The clock has star­ted tick­ing for India’s auto­mot­ive industry, and for buy­ers of its next gen­er­a­tion of con­nec­ted vehicles.

From soft­ware-rich vehicles such as the Tata Har­rier EV, Mahindra XEV 9e, BE 6, Tata Curvv.ev and Hyundai Creta Elec­tric to con­nec­ted buses, trucks and smart tract­ors, the next gen­er­a­tion of vehicles will have to be built with cyber­se­cur­ity at their core rather than treat­ing it as another soft­ware fea­ture.

Industry estim­ates sug­gest meet­ing the new require­ments could add ₹10,000-15,000 to the cost of highly-con­nec­ted vehicles through invest­ments in secure elec­tron­ics, soft­ware val­id­a­tion and long-term cyber­se­cur­ity sup­port.

In return, buy­ers stand to gain stronger pro­tec­tion against cyber threats, safer over-the-air (OTA) soft­ware updates, bet­ter pro­tec­tion of vehicle data and faster soft­ware fixes throughout a vehicle’s life, while auto­makers and com­pon­ent sup­pli­ers will have to redesign everything from elec­tronic archi­tec­ture to soft­ware devel­op­ment and long-term life­cycle sup­port.

Driv­ing this shift is a draft noti­fic­a­tion issued by the Min­istry of Road Trans­port and High­ways (MoRTH) on June 22, pro­pos­ing the inser­tion of Rules 125-T and 125-U into the Cent­ral Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989.

The pro­posal would make com­pli­ance with AIS-189 for Cyber Secur­ity Man­age­ment Sys­tems (CSMS) and AIS-190 for Soft­ware Update Man­age­ment Sys­tems (SUMS) man­dat­ory for vehicle type approval, with imple­ment­a­tion begin­ning on Octo­ber 1, 2026, for new Level 3 auto­mated vehicles before expand­ing in phases to con­nec­ted pas­sen­ger vehicles, com­mer­cial vehicles, tract­ors and con­struc­tion equip­ment through Octo­ber 2029, align­ing India with cyber­se­cur­ity reg­u­la­tions already in force across the European Union, Japan and South Korea.

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