Panatech Asia sees increased demand for crash test dummies in India

Panatech Asia, an exclusive distributor of instrumented and finite element dummies made by USA-based Humanetics Innovative Solutions, and a supplier of related engineering services to the automotive industry in India, foresees an upswing in the demand for crash test dummies in India in 2015.

This comes on the back of expansion operations as sanctioned by the ministry and NATRiP wherein the authorities are planning to setup new centres. Secondly, OEMs such as Maruti Suzuki India and Tata Motors are also known to be setting up / upgrading their respective existing R&D test facilities.

With its head office based in Pune and a small team of 10 engineers with mixed skills in the areas of mechanical, electronics and instrumentation (all trained in the USA), Panatech has an impressive list of customers, which includes NATRiP, ARAI, ISRO, iCAT, Tata Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra, TVS Motor Company, Maruti Suzuki, IIT-Madras, IIT-Bombay, Bajaj Auto, and many others.

Panatech imports these crash test dummies from Humanetics (USA) and assembles these dummies at its small facility in Pune. The assembling process of these units include loading them up with the necessary instrumentation like load cell matrix, accelerometers, potentiometers, special sensors and others.

Humanetics Innovative Solutions, on the other hand, is known as the world’s largest manufacturer and supplier of anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs), also knowns as crash test dummies. The company produces a wide variety of products including regulated and non-regulated ATDs ranging in size from newborn infants to large adults that are used in the automotive, military and aerospace industries.

With a history for more than four decades, this company is known to have pioneered the industry with the development of research dummies for testing air and space craft ejection seats. The technology of those early test dummies provided the foundation for creation of automotive crash test dummies in the early 1960s. Since then, the technological advances have contributed to constant improvements in the capabilities, quality and accuracy of crash test dummies.

While Humanetics had produced the Hybrid I and Hybrid II series of dummies in the early 1970s, it had acquired the dummy development and manufacturing business of TNO automotive in 1999. Latter was Europe’s leading and largest dummy company, thus creating the first and truly global dummy development and manufacturing company.

Humanetics, in the USA, works closely with the automotive lobby (GM, Ford and others) to continuously evolve the process of design and development of these crash test dummies.

According to Vijay Deshpande, managing director, Panatech Asia, each of these units costs in the range of Rs 80 lakh to Rs 1 crore. “We are now talking about the new series of more advanced crash test dummies such as WorldSID, THOR and Q3S,” he told Autocar Professional on the sidelines of the recently concluded Symposium of International Automotive Technology (SIAT), organised by ARAI in Pune last month.