India's ADAS is about to lose its radar: Bharat NCAP 2.0 is pushing camera-only safety into the cheapest cars

Two companies that sell very different things — a carmaker and a Tier-1 supplier — used the same month this September to describe the same idea: India's next wave of driver assistance will likely run on one camera and no radar. Suzuki's chief technology officer, Katsuhiro Kato, told the company's technology strategy briefing that it wants automatic emergency braking and lane departure prevention to be standard "even on affordable cars", built around "just-right ADAS" that strips out the front radar in favour of high-resolution cameras and dedicated AI chips. Days later, Aumovio — the automotive business Continental spun off — told Autocar Professional it has a single-camera system, internally called "1V", already in series production abroad and under discussion with multiple Indian OEMs, built specifically to bring lane-keep assist, emergency braking and adaptive cruise to cars that have never carried a radar bill of materials before.

Neither company has committed to a model or a date. But the reason both are chasing the same architecture at the same time is not a coincidence: it is Bharat NCAP 2.0.

The regulation doing the pushing

In November 2025, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways notified a draft under AIS-197 Revision 1 — the rulebook for the next phase of Bharat NCAP — that rewrites how a car earns its stars. The current programme scores occupant protection in two crash tests. The draft replaces that with a 100-point assessment spread across five pillars: Crash Protection (55 points), Vulnerable Road-User Protection (20), Safe Driving (10), Accident Avoidance (10) and Post-Crash Safety (5). Five crash tests take the place of today's two, including a new 50kph full-width frontal impact and a 50kph rear impact, and electronic stability control plus curtain airbags become compulsory just to be eligible for a rating at all. A five-star result needs 70 of the 100 points from 2027, rising to 80 from 2029.

Speaking at the 66th SIAM Annual Convention in September 2026, road transport minister Nitin Gadkari confirmed the programme stays on track for October 2027, when the current protocol expires, and described the scope in his own words: "We are going to evaluate the entire crash chain" — not just what happens in the 100 milliseconds of a collision, but whether the car helped avoid it and what happens to people after it. He invited manufacturers to bring suggestions drawn from global practice and from Indian startups, which is as close as the ministry has come to publicly inviting exactly the kind of low-cost ADAS pitch that Suzuki and Aumovio are now making.

Crucially, autonomous emergency braking itself stays optional under the draft. But it sits inside the Accident Avoidance pillar, worth a tenth of the total score, in a system where the five-star bar keeps rising. A manufacturer that skips ADAS is not disqualified — it is just mathematically boxed out of the top rating as the threshold climbs, at exactly the moment Indian buyers have started reading star counts the way they once read mileage figures.

What "camera-only" actually removes

A conventional Level 2 system, like the one on the Hyundai Bayon, fuses a windscreen-mounted camera with a front radar: the camera reads lane markings and classifies what it sees, the radar measures distance and closing speed reliably through rain, dust and glare that can blind a lens. Removing the radar removes a cost — the sensor, its mounting, and the fusion electronics that reconcile two data streams — but it also removes a capability. Suzuki's own framing is candid about this: the company is targeting "major cost reductions" while aiming for "equal or better safety performance", which is a development goal stated in a briefing, not a published result from a production car. Aumovio leans on the same logic from the supplier side, describing its camera as built on deep-learning techniques that let the system "keep improving its reading of driving environments over time" rather than relying on a second sensor to catch what the first one misses.

Whether that AI-trained camera genuinely matches radar's performance in Indian conditions — heat haze on an expressway, a monsoon downpour, a two-wheeler closing fast from behind a truck — is not yet something either company has demonstrated with independent, published data for this market. What is already running on Indian roads today offers a partial answer: the Honda City, Elevate and Amaze have sold with single-camera ADAS for several years with no radar at all, proving the architecture is viable at a basic level. What Suzuki and Aumovio are proposing is a harder version of the same bet, pushed down into cars priced closer to ₹6–8 lakh, where the entire system has to cost a fraction of what it costs on a City.

Why this is an India story, not a lab story

Kato's briefing opened with a number, not a feature: more than 1.77 lakh road accident fatalities in India in 2024. His argument was that fitting expensive ADAS "only to a few luxury cars does not reduce accidents across society" — which is also, not coincidentally, the exact gap a five-pillar, points-based Bharat NCAP is designed to close by rewarding accident-avoidance tech on every car tested, not just the flagship. If a radar-free camera system genuinely halves the cost of fitting AEB and lane-keeping, it stops being a feature carmakers add to flagship variants to chase a star rating, and starts being something they can standardise across a model range the way six airbags became standard after Bharat NCAP's first wave of five-star results. That is the shift both companies are betting on, and it is why a CTO's roadmap slide and a supplier's India-head interview, read together with a ministry's draft notification, add up to more than any one of them alone.

The Auto Grid angle

A front radar lives behind the painted bumper, which is exactly where we see the knock-on cost of a careless respray: too many coats or a heavy metallic flake can attenuate the signal enough to throw a fault. A camera-only system removes that specific worry — there is no radar behind the bumper to protect — but it concentrates all of the system's accuracy in one place instead: the camera module behind the windscreen, and the small, precisely cut sensor window that any film or wrap has to clear without a millimetre of overlap. As more Indian cars go camera-only, that windscreen zone becomes the one part of the front end where sensor-aware cutting matters more, not less, and it is exactly where we check calibration on every car that comes through the Kondapur bay with PPF going on ahead of a delivery.

Where this goes next

Neither Suzuki nor Aumovio has named a model or a launch date, and Bharat NCAP 2.0 itself is still a draft, 11 months from taking effect. But the direction is no longer in question: a points system that rewards accident-avoidance tech on every car, a minister publicly inviting cost-down proposals, and two separate companies independently building the same radar-free architecture all point the same way. The next ADAS announcement to watch for is not a flagship SUV adding a feature — it is a sub-₹10 lakh hatchback getting one for the first time.