Inside Bosch: How R&D Is Shaping the Future of Everyday Tech and Mobility

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You must have heard about Bosch and you must have heard about it in two or three different ways. One is what you see which is washing machines, dishwashers and so on, essentially stuff that's inside the home. You could be a user of some of their products like tools for example electrical tools which you could use if you're a DIY kind like me or you could be experiencing them because they're all inside cars and two wheelers either ensuring that your car is moving safely, breaking safely and of course driving the internal combustion engine or for that matter now electrical engine.

So what's the larger research and development conceptual vision that drives the company and what is that R&D that is or rather how is that R&D playing out in a way that it is actually affecting or making life simpler for you and that is really the question that I put to Guru Prasad Mudlapur, the president of Bosch in India, also managing director of Bosch Limited and chief technology officer of Bosch Limited since in the last two years. So my question really to him or rather my set of questions to him is really these. One is what's Bosch R&D mean and how does it work and how does it play out in a way that it converts to products and processes that we experience.

Second of course is what's the thinking that drives it. Is it working with some of those original equipment manufacturers, car companies for example or is it thinking ahead. So I'm putting all these questions to Guru Prasad Mudlapur, the president of Bosch Group in India, managing director of Bosch Limited and chief technology officer of Bosch Limited again since the last couple of years.

So my questions to him really center around this. One is Bosch's R&D. What is the core R&D and the soul of that R&D which drives their products and inventions and innovations that they bring out which we experience quite soon in their cars or in the cars that we drive or in the two wheelers that we drive.

And the second part of course is what is Bosch thinking as it looks ahead in terms of the big transitions that are happening particularly in areas like fuels and environment and how is that all playing out. Guru thank you so much for joining me. So just to give you a background before I quickly jump in.

So I want to focus a little on the R&D side of Bosch. Now as a consumer I know Bosch through many lenses. Some of it which I can see like maybe home appliances, power tools, I'm a DIY kind of guy or stuff that's maybe under the hood which I know is there but I cannot see.

So tell us about what drives the Bosch vision in the way products are manufactured or produced or researched upon and how has it been over the years.

Okay thank you Govind. Thank you for having me on your podcast. It's great to be here.

I'll give you a little bit of a background about Bosch and then get into your question as well. I think one word to summarize Bosch is that it's a technology company. I mean we've been known to be a technology company for a long long time.

We've done great products, do a lot of technology innovation always at the cutting edge of technology and done it over a century or more also in India by the way. So worldwide we are over 135 years old in India more than 102 years now. So a very long legacy and very very high focus on R&D, technology, patents, innovation and so on.

So to get into your question we spend in R&D about six to eight percent of our total sales every year. So that's to give you a number last year we our sales were 91.6 billion euro and the R&D spend was about 7.3 billion euro. So that's the kind of money we invest in new technologies, new developments year on year.

We do that also in the Indian context. Globally we have about 90,000 R&D engineers. A large part of that is also in India and that's what also makes India that much more unique in the Bosch context for us.

Now in the Indian context we've consistently also invested quite a lot of money in R&D. Six to eight percent has been the norm for Bosch all along compared to many other Indian companies which are maybe one, one and a half percent at most. So there we differentiate ourselves quite a lot and also we have the largest R&D center for Bosch globally outside of Germany located in India.

That's our sister company called BGSW, Bosch Global Software and Technologies Company which does developments for across the world. So everywhere, every product that Bosch develops there is some amount of Indian engineering that goes into it. Of course in India we are already over 100 years as I said earlier, 102 years or more.

We've been manufacturing for over 65 years so long legacy of make in India and we are also very, very committed to localizing and doing things for the Indian market. 70% of what we do is typically for our mobility sector in India while the rest of it goes into other segments. So that's broadly the context of where we come from, deeply embedded in technology and R&D and we continue to do it that way.

So tell us about R&D and I guess we'll speak more about mobility as we go along but what's the R&D principle here when it comes to deciding what to do and how to devote resources? For example at this point of time as we speak, what would R&D, your colleagues in R&D be thinking about whether it's in the context of the Indian market which I guess would make it easier to understand for some of our viewers here or for that matter even the global market?

Okay so I think just to give you a context of how product developments or R&D happens in a MNC and especially now restricting to Bosch, I think it's good to know that there is a concept of platform development. So there are technologies developed as a platform which can be reused in different regions or adapted for requirements across different segments in different regions for different applications. So that's typically how the core platform gets developed and then gets sort of distributed to different regions.

And when I say a core platform gets developed, it is not necessary that the core platform always gets developed in Europe or in North America or somewhere. It can also happen anywhere in the world. So in some cases that core technology development can happen in India, in China or in Germany or North America.

So it can happen anywhere and then variants get developed all over the world. So that's basically a way in which we are able to keep the technology development costs as efficient as possible and make technology reuse happen at the most optimum price so that the end consumer benefits from this technology. A lot of what we do is also regulation led.

So the regulations, for example, in the case of Indian auto segment, if you were to take emissions is governed by an emission regulation called BS stage 6 currently. And this is more or less equivalent to or nearly equivalent to Eurosex. And so Eurosex development happens somewhere and then it sort of gets propagated to different regions and then the developments happen in the region based on those variants here.

A different example would be when you take a two-wheeler product, certain because the large market is here, certain developments could happen here or could happen in Japan, for example, and then get propagated elsewhere. So this is the core philosophy of how we do product elements. But now coming a bit deeper in, when we look at India, we either do it based on the platform or in some cases purely as developments for the region.

And in most cases or more or less in all cases, there is an element of regionalization of technology that happens, which helps us fine tune the product for cost or performance or ruggedness or environmental conditions or whatever that's necessary for the Indian context. So this is always done in India. And now coming back to your question on what are our guys busy doing right now?

It's typically topics like, for example, in mobility, it could be hydrogen developments. It could be electrification. We're working on products and technologies for electric vehicles.

In ADAS, it could be topics like autonomous driving developments. It could also be topics which do some things, continue to do some things on emissions if required or on safety systems or on braking developments, all in the mobility area. But if we look at non-mobility topics, and I can give you an example of our domestic appliances.

Since you brought this up earlier, they could be working on refrigerators for the Indian market or dishwashers for the Indian market, which by the way, I mean, we started off, it's an interesting story. We started off initially by bringing what we did in Europe into India. And we realized very, very quickly that these were not the products that would work very well in India.

Although they were localized to some extent, they won't be the best ones for the Indian market. The Indian use cases are different. The electricity grid behaves very differently.

There are things that happen very differently in an Indian household. So we had to localize products. We had to redevelop products for the Indian market.

And that's what our engineers would be busy on.

So what would be the key difference between a washing machine or a dishwasher sold in Europe versus the one that is sold in India right now, or the differences?

I would say there are quite a few differences. See, the thing is the user in both cases, while the purpose is the same, the user behaves very differently. The environment is very different.

And for example, in Europe, the grid stability is extremely high. In India, there are areas where the power fluctuations are very, very normal. Households which have very poor earthing is a very common situation in India.

We will be surprised on how many times we've encountered a rat in a washing machine, which doesn't happen in the Western context. There are things like this, which are pretty uniquely Indian. And of course, more or less always the dishwashers or washing machines are handled by our mates, not necessarily by us doing it if we were to take it in the context of Europe.

And the way they handle it, the way they would rather just start and press one button and then things should work. And they would rather not get into all the program modes and they wouldn't want to do multiple things before they get to washing and so on. So these are things which are, I would say, uniquely Indian or uniquely regional if we can extend it beyond India to certain parts of certain similar geographies like India.

So I would say these are some of the customizations that need to be done and made much more rugged, made much more sort of Indianized for working environments here.

And you said voltage, for example, to protect against surges and fluctuations both ways. So just a slightly different kind of question. What is it that you've seen, let's say, in a Bosch product over the years as a user where you felt this is something that we need to do or I need to send back to R&D as a feedback, because this is clearly working differently in India?

Quite a lot. I mean, I can tell you, I have a kettle which I use, a Bosch kettle, which I use quite a lot to make tea at home. And the water is generally hard in India, right?

So or it's coming from all sources. And sometimes it's soft, sometimes it's hard and it starts to scale quite a lot. So these are things, of course, scaling can happen, but then is the ease of cleaning that's as required for India.

I think that's something we need to look at it and then say, OK, guys, now ensure that the lid is open fully so that you are able to clean it properly because we don't want the scales to remain in the kettle, scales have to come out. So these are things which are uniquely to be customized for the local requirements. So that would be a very simple example.

Of course, we can go on with multiple things about every product we have. And we certainly also welcome a lot of or also normally always get inputs from our users, customers who write to me or write to our channels and then ask us to fix on something. So we certainly welcome that aspect as well.

What's an example of feedback that you've got, and particularly personally, that you said, gosh, how did we miss this one?

Well, there's plenty. I mean, to take domestic appliances, I get half a dozen emails a day on different aspects which don't work or don't really work well. And not necessarily only on the products, it's also on the service, on the service quality we have.

So a service technician goes home, he doesn't carry the right things, he opens the dishwasher halfway, he realizes something is wrong, he goes back and this is absolutely not acceptable as an end consumer. So if it happens to us at home, we won't take it. And then this is something that seems to be prevalent quite a lot.

And we get a lot of feedback on this, which we're trying very, very hard to fix continuously. And we want to keep our service standards very, very high, product quality very high. And so any input like this in any geography, I mean, any state or any city that it happens, I think it's very welcome for us that we take it on priority and try and fix it as quickly as possible.

And that I'm assuming, just before we move on to mobility, is also a critical aspect of the Indian market, that is the higher stress on service, which is external service people coming and fixing things as opposed to, let's say, a slightly more DIY kind of culture elsewhere.

Yeah, absolutely. In India, everybody expects service to happen in the normal way while on in many European locations, I think, DIY is very, very common. Yeah.

Right. Okay. So let's come back to mobility. You talked about four or five areas where you're currently working on. So tell us about, you know, where you are currently within the car or within the heavy commercial vehicle, and what aspect of your work, whether it's research or whether it's product development, is actually, let's say, playing an important role in moving that car, not just moving it, but moving it at speed. You talked about braking, efficiency. So where are, where is it all kind of playing out right now as we speak?

So, yeah, I mean, it's a long list, Govind. So Bosch is the biggest, one of the big, maybe biggest tier one around for a long, long time, and we're deeply embedded with every OEM. So we do quite a lot of things which help the car or a motorbike or a truck to move.

Let's start with the engine management system. So we do quite a lot to make the engines run. In a combustion engine, we do quite a lot of parts from the fuel injection systems, the exhaust management systems, the electronic control units, which control these systems, the pumps, the sensors, which measure performance and calibrate the performance.

Now, coming into the car, we do a lot of body electronics. Then we do quite a lot of things on the chassis, which we call it the safety aspect. So we do quite a lot of safety electronics.

We do quite a lot of safety systems in terms of braking, in terms of ABS, CSP, which keep the car stable. We do quite a lot of things towards airbags, airbag control systems, not the airbags, but the airbag control systems. We do a lot of software, which is not something a lot of people know Bosch about.

We do extensive amount of software for the cars. We do a lot of things towards the things that go into the aftermarket in a car. So it's a whole gamut of things that we do for a car.

Yeah. So a lot of it, like you said, is hidden under the hood. It's not necessarily seen by the end consumer.

Unless you open the hood, you won't notice a Bosch setting somewhere. But there's a huge amount of Bosch there. If we just look at an electric vehicle, then typically the engine gets replaced by what's called an e-axle, which is a combination of a motor, a gearbox, and an inverter.

We do the e-axles. We do a lot of power electronics. We, of course, don't do the batteries and systems around the batteries, but everything that powers or drives an electric vehicle, we do.

The power electronics, which controls, charges the batteries and other things we do. We also do quite a lot of things. Of course, we do everything else, which is common between a combustion vehicle and an electric vehicle as well.

Right. So let me pick on two. One is, and if I'm right there, let's say something that represents maybe more contemporary or cutting-edge technology, which could be, let's say, ADS, and on the other hand, fuels. I will spend some time on fuels. So what are the kind of efforts that are going on there? One is the autonomous part. What's the demand there like? Of course, more and more cars in India now have ADS, and it's positioned as something cool to have, even if it may not be necessary to have, but it's pretty common elsewhere. And on the other hand, clearly, there is a fuel transition happening, and you've spoken of hydrogen, for example, in the past. So what are the kind of efforts that are going on in these two areas? Just to pick on these.

The ABS stands for anti-lock braking systems, which don't, I mean, in certain conditions, when you brake hard, the wheels lock up, typically without ABS, and then the vehicle loses stability and control. With an ABS system installed in a car, which is now mandatory, it doesn't lock. So it's anti-lock braking system.

So the wheel locks, wheel doesn't lock anymore, and it allows you much better dynamics and much better control of the car. So that's the reason for ABS. Of course, the next generation of that is ESP, which is the electronic stability program management.

So that's also managing much better in terms of the vehicle dynamics, and under certain conditions of the vehicle, it brings in added safety and braking performance. So these two together have brought in very high levels of stability and braking performance and safety into the car. Of course, ABS and, I mean, of course, airbag and the seatbelts, which are the most basic, but probably the most effective safety mechanism in a car, are also very, very relevant for safety.

So I'll come to fuels in a second, but just to stick with that, there is a level of autonomy that's coming into this, right? I mean, I can see it in electric cars, for example, where it could be configured in a way that the car will stop if someone suddenly comes across the road, regardless of your actions. So are you playing a role in that?

Yes. So that's called the emergency braking. So, yeah, I mean, when certain levels of autonomous driving capabilities are built in, these ABS, ESP systems are capable of detecting, or not on their own, but together with additional sensors and radars and other safety systems brought into the car, they're able to detect that you are about to collide with a pedestrian or something like that, and a pedestrian protection mechanism kicks in, and the vehicle is getting into an emergency braking mode, and it stops. Some of the recent launches of our OEMs in India, I won't want to name them, but several of them already have this feature built in.

So they have both during reverse, when you try to reverse a car and suddenly somebody comes in the way, the car brakes, or when you're driving forward as well, it does. It's typically not connected to autonomous driving at all, but it uses some of the sensors of an autonomous driving mechanism to do this. But of course, cars these days, especially in the West, and now starting some years ago also in India, start to have certain levels of autonomous driving included, which helps you to stay in a lane, so lane assist or lane departure warnings, or having to autonomously drive the vehicle for 60 seconds without holding the steering, so that you're able to certain things in the car, and then you come back and hold the steering soon after that. So some of these things have started to come in, still very basic in terms of how autonomously the cars can drive, but some of these features have started to come into Indian cars too.

Right, and tell us about fuels. What are the current efforts and your own thoughts and ideas as we transition in fuels in some cases, of course, we may not transition in some other cases, but what's the kind of work that's going on?

Yeah, so I think in fuels, we have the combustion technologies, typically the gasoline and diesel technologies, which have existed for many, many decades, continuing to go on, and they will still be around for quite a while, and they will not go away anytime soon in our view. But more and more, we will also start to see, or rather, we already see some amount of blending happening with ethanol coming in into the mix. So that's one trend that's happened in India.

Almost requires no changes with any of the systems that we provide. Some amount of recalibration and some amount of new work needs to be done, but that's very minimal. On the other spectrum could be things like hydrogen injection.

Of course, there has been other gases, CNG, going on for quite a while, but hydrogen would be a new fuel that will come in into the vehicles as an injection system and as fuel cell electric vehicles. Moving on, beyond this would be the transition to hybrids and finally to complete electric vehicles. Of course, I don't mean to say that all this will happen sequentially.

They're all already happening. They're all present in different degrees in different countries. China, for example, already has very high levels of electric vehicles being sold.

Europe also has quite a lot of electric vehicles sold. So they are full battery electric vehicles. There are hydrogen trucks being piloted in several geographies around the world.

And in India, we have all of them also prevalent in different elements. So this is something that's constantly evolving and it's something that will go on together. And at some point of time, we believe the combustion vehicles will start to come down and more and more battery electric vehicles will take over.

So we believe about 20% of all the vehicles sold by 2030 could be electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles.

And this is a slightly again a step back question. So you work with all major car companies globally, and you are typically responding to what they are responding to, which is their customers. Now, electric is an interesting example, because we obviously saw a very high pace of adoption in the beginning. And that is somewhat slowed down now, including in Europe, North America, and so on. Maybe because this is how the cycle is. You have very high adoption in the beginning, then a sort of plateau, and then maybe it may pick up later. Now, and then there's the China factor, you talked about Chinese dominance in electric, thanks to BYD and so on. But my question is really, how does a company like Bosch look at something which is at the cutting edge of consumption? Are you able to lead the process to some extent? Or do you try with your biggest customers? Or do you wait for them to tell you or from their own understanding of what consumers are saying or demanding?

I would say it's a mix of both. There are areas where we lead. Typically, as a technology company, we've always invested quite a lot of money. And electric vehicles, for example, or components for electric vehicles, in our case, have been going on in terms of R&D for 12 years or more. So there's a lot of work we've done. And we've also sold quite a lot into the OEM space so far.

So there is a lot of this happens from our side. There's also a lot of OEMs tell us what needs to be done. And in some cases, they come back and say, OK, your Gen 1 had this issue, and maybe you need to do some of these changes to make Gen 2s better.

So this kind of feedback is a constant thing with most of our OEMs. And then that is the process through which we continuously improve. So it's sort of a give and take on both the areas where we lead and areas where we build the platform, take it to the OEMs, and showcase it to them, and tell them that this is how we can do it. And they adopt that and make pilot vehicles, test it out, give us feedback, and then the cycle continues. So that's typically how things work.

So the transition from internal combustion to electric, even as it is happening and all the intermediate stages, is quite a dramatic one, given the fact that internal combustion has been around for more than a century. And now we are seeing this dramatic change to which everyone is rushing to adapt and adopt. Is there anything else like that on the horizon that you see today from your vantage point, whether it's in mobility or some other aspect of products or services that you are in?

Govind, I would put it this way. I think the space of mobility is undergoing massive change like never before. The reason I say this is because fundamentally the electric electronic architectures or EE architectures, as they call it for vehicles, is undergoing a massive transformation. And that is what the vehicles are riding on, and that is becoming more and more complex as we go forward. That's one angle of change that's happening. The vehicles are becoming cleaner, safer, and that's the electrification and more safety features bringing in ADAS and other features coming in.

That's one wave that's happening. There's also a lot of change happening in the environment. So the vehicle-to-infrastructure or vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems are also starting to come up because the vehicle then becomes a much more of a smarter vehicle.

And much more of information that's possible to come into the vehicle and also get out of the vehicle. So this is now becoming a two-way street for a vehicle. So that's the other dimension of change that's happening.

There are also changes that are happening with regard to how the business environment or the business models of the cars being built or being sold are changing. So that's the dimension for an OEM. For example, some OEMs are now going direct to consumers, bypassing a dealer and a distributor and all this change.

So that's another element that's coming in. So I would say the disruption today is happening at many, many levels in the auto space, almost like never before. And both in terms of technology content that goes in into what we can see in the cars of today and also in terms of the environment in which they operate.

Every aspect of it is undergoing a big change. At some point, the dream is that there will not be a driver in the car. There will not be a steering in the car. Of course, there will still be tires and it will still look like a box with wheels, but everything else might undergo a fundamental change in terms of how you move. So that's the kind of change that's happening, and that makes it an exciting time at one hand for companies like us to participate, to lead the change, to drive the change, and work with our OEMs to manage this change better. But at the other hand, it's also a huge amount of costs, a huge amount of innovation content that has to come in, not just with a tier one.

It can also be at OEM. A lot of OEMs now do what a tier one does. A lot of tier ones have stretched themselves beyond their space. There are things that will happen very differently in the environment. So that would be another dimension which will continue to change. So I would say this is a phase of change which is absolutely fascinating and broad-based.

Right. And last two questions. So I must ask you the customary artificial intelligence question from two parts. One is intra-organization and the other is, of course, what I see on the dashboard or what I could see on the dashboard. So tell us about what's going on there.

Okay. So I would say within the organization, AI has found its way already for quite a while. It's not something new, but it's something now gaining more and more prominence and more and more acceptability.

Also, thanks to Gen AI and large language models and so on, becoming more prevalent. I think that's what has brought in a new dimension to AI today. We've been using cutting edge AI in manufacturing already for many, many years.

We've used AI in products. We've used them across different machine learning as a methodology in different elements we do. So there is AI in many aspects of what we do.

Now, thanks to Gen AI and the new wave of AI thinking that's coming in, there's also more productivity gains that are coming in. So people are able to do things better. We are able to code better. We are able to do more with less. So this is the new wave of productivity changes that are happening. And this is also something we are riding on as an organization.

So that's one aspect of internal change that's going on thanks to AI. Of course, the same is happening very, very extensively in the cars of the world, cars of today. And as we go into the future, of course, a lot more there too.

Cars of today already have autonomous driving, which by the way, is neural net based, which reads road signs autonomously and then acts on it, learns from it, then decodes what's going on in the street. And so a lot of autonomous driving will or has been built on AI, will be built on AI and continues to evolve on AI and mature on AI. So this is something that is becoming very, very core part of how we drive in the future.

We may not get to touch and see it, but we will certainly experience the benefits of AI in everything we do.

Right. Last question. So you worked in your career at Bosch in many areas, including automotive semiconductors and ECUs or electronic control units. So I mean, that's just a backdrop. But if I would ask you that if you were to put on your engineering hat or your R&D hat, what's the one thing that you'd like to either redesign or maybe change it today? I'm talking about something that's either inside the car or something that we can see from outside. What is it that, let's say, you want to work on, something that you're deeply passionate about?

Yeah, I mean, there are so many things. I would say the list is endless because we are sitting on such a user requirement database, which we could continuously enhance and improve. If there's something I would do to make things better now, I would say safety.

In the case of Indian driving conditions and in India, specifically with our driving habits, I would say safety would be the number one priority for us to change. So bringing in as much safety relevant things into a car or a two-wheeler and make it as safe as possible to go from A to B would be my highest priority.

That's a good note and a wonderful note to end on. Guru, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Thank you, Govind. It was a pleasure