( Air-Hybrid Blog )

Hello India!

Posted on 20 October 2011 | 1 Comments

We’re in Pune, India, this week where the cutaway model of the Scuderi Engine prototype made its Indian debut. It was featured in our exhibit at the Virtual Powertrain Conference, our first official event participation in this country.

A strong demand for dramatic reductions in the C02 and NOx emissions from  

vehicles have forced the engine manufacturing industry to develop new powertrain concepts and bring them to market. With that, development of new propulsion systems is a priority. And that's why the Scuderi Engine is looking so attractive to the Indian OEMs.

According to Wikipedia, the automotive industry in India is one of the largest in the world and one of the fastest growing globally. India's passenger car and commercial vehicle manufacturing industry is the seventh largest in the world, with an annual production of more than 3.7 million units in 2010. According to recent studies, India is set to overtake Brazil to become the sixth largest passenger vehicle producer in the world, growing 16-18 per cent to sell around three million units in the course of 2011-12. In 2009, India emerged as Asia's fourth largest exporter of passenger cars, behind Japan, South Korea, and Thailand.

Further, as of last year, India is home to 40 million passenger vehicles and more than 3.7 million automotive vehicles were produced in India in 2010 (an increase of 33.9%), making the country the second fastest growing automobile market in the world. According to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, annual car sales are projected to increase up to 5 million vehicles by 2015 and more than 9 million by 2020. By 2050, the country is expected to top the world in car volumes with approximately 611 million vehicles on the nation's roads.  

That sure is a lot of fuel consumption and pollution occurring every day. So the engine makers here believe the Scuderi Engine is one technology that could help them lower their fuel consumption considerably while at the same time significantly reducing their C02 and NOx emissions. And that has made our exhibit stand a very popular one.

The attendees of the conference also had a chance to hear Stephen Scuderi, the company’s vice president and patent attorney explain the evolution of the new combustion process from when it was just a concept drawn out on paper by his father years ago, to a working engine today. In his keynote address, Stephen was able to dive deep into the technologies used to bring the engine to life and explained how our engineers solved the various hurdles along the way. 

In a future post when it becomes available, we will provide a link to the post-conference video where you can watch Stephen's presentation in its entirety.