Meet India's First Self-Driving Car: Bengaluru-Based Startup Unveils Minus Zero zPod

Marque angel investors-backed self-driving startup Minus Zero unveiled an autonomous vehicle based on a camera-sensor suite on Sunday. With the ability to scale up to Level 5 autonomy capabilities, the vehicle, named zPod, can drive itself in all environmental and geographical constraints, company's co-founder Gagandeep Reehal announced.

Co-founded in 2021 by Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, the Bangalore-based tech platform plans to produce fully-autonomous vehicles on the lines of the ones by global tech giants such as Tesla and Google. The startup also plans to leverage AI to resolve issues confronted by tech firms trying to produce autonomous vehicles suitable for Indian roads.

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The platform also floated a whitepaper on "Nature-Inspired AI" (NIA), claiming it as a novel approach to building generalized autonomous agents inspired by the physics-aware vision and the predictive decision-making capabilities of a human brain, making it efficient in handling real-world road scenarios.

Using NIA, Minus Zero introduced the concept of 'True Vision Autonomy' (TVA), which they believe is the safest and most scalable approach to autonomous driving, and can scale up to Level 5 autonomy, it said. TVA is vehicle agnostic and relies only on cameras as its sensor suite.

The company also plans expanding its autonomous vehicle trials in foreign markets with stable regulatory norms over the next two years, including public road trials. "With true vision autonomy coming to the fore, one can make autonomous vehicles a reality, solving major pain points of the mobility paradigm," said Reehal, who is also the Chief Executive Officer of Minus Zero.

The company said autonomous vehicles can be used in several use-cases, including deploying them for commuting in various campuses, including residential campuses, various institutes, and many other areas.