Sona Comstar bullish on new suspension module

The new suspension module developed in-house has an addressable market of 3 million per annum and the company hopes to launch the product by 2025.Shahkar Abidi reports.

- Shahkar Abidi

Sona Comstar has developed an integrated motor controller module (IMCM) for suspension systems which can be used in high-end cars. The development is said to have taken place when the company's R&D team was actually working on another product called the Belt Starter-Generator (BSG) which is an enabler for transmitting torque to the engine crankshafts when operating as a hybrid drive motor.

The company's top leadership is obviously delighted with this promising development even as it is expected that the IMCM will reach SOP stage only by around fiscal 2025. Moreover, it has opened up a potential new stream of earnings for the company with an order from a new OEM customer alone expected to bring in about Rs 400 crore of annual revenues.

According to the company, the new product has an addressable market of around 3 million annual volumes including exports, which even by conservative estimates is significant for Sona Comstar to capitalise on its first mover advantage. The IMCM was apparently an "incidental" development as Vivek Vikram Singh, the Managing Director and Group CEO put it, in an interaction with Autocar Professional.

It was a request from an OEM customer wanting inputs for a predictive active suspension system that led to this development. The IMCM as well as its software module is part of a larger system being developed by the OEM.

The project has been named internally as 'Gliding'. Singh also said the development will need a few modifications, most of which will be implemented in the software while the motor itself was repackaged by shrinking its size and elongating it.