Peter Gliwa and Cristian Garzón have been to India last week. Read Peter's summary of the trip plus some more general thoughts.
Cristian Garzón and I just came back from our first Timing & T1 roadshow with our new Indian distributor Trident Infosol. We covered five regions in five days and I must say this trip was packed. Our day looked like this: get up between 3am and 5am to get to the airport in time for an early flight. Cab to the first customer, workshop, transfer to the next customer (rather than having lunch), second workshop, transfer to the hotel and business diner followed by one quick hour dealing with the most important e-mails of the day. In bed around 11pm.
But it was certainly worth it! Each customer we visited got excited about T1. One team had so many participants, we had to move the meeting to a conference hotel so that all of the interested engineers could join. It was also good to meet our partners from Trident in person. Thank you for your hospitality and for the flawless organization of the trip!
Here some more general observations.
**Market**
For years, engineering has been off-loaded by OEMs and tier-1s around the world to India but the decision-making as well as most of the design remained with the OEMs and tier-1s. We also observed excitement about T1 during previous roadshows but often people would say that we need to convince their counterpart in Europe, the US or the far East.
This has changed. Indian companies now cover most or even all of the development independently. They can also make tool decisions which is good for us and our Indian business.
**Time zone**
India has one time zone named IST which is frequently mistaken to be the abbreviation of ‘Indian Standard Time’. What it really means is ‘Indian Stretchable Time’. We waited for one hour in the hotel lobby the first morning and were a bit puzzled because there were three workshops at three different locations in Bengaluru to cover. It all worked out in the end because customers also stick to IST.
**Traffic**
Traffic in India is very interesting, scary and very entertaining at the same time. I’d rather spend one hour watching the happenings at a big junction then watching a Cricket match. In most regions of the world, the comfort ‘keep-out zone’ around a vehicle is two to three meters. In India, it’s around two to three centimeters. You experience several “Gosh! That was close!” and near-crash scenarios every single minute. Cows frequently join the chaos and stay totally relaxed. Magically, all works out pretty well in the end. Somehow. It really is fascinating!
If ever the OEMs manage to build self-driving cars for Europe or the US, they certainly can bin their software when going to India. If your ‘defensive driving’ setting is set to anything above 2%, your car will never get anywhere.
