India’s V2V Mandate Is Still a Draft, and Its Backers Asked for a Softer Deadline
The October 2028 date is real, but V2V mandate sits in a draft notification, depends on a standard that is not finalised, and was the subject of a request to split it into several milestones.
The 5G Automotive Association brought its members to New Delhi this week to demonstrate vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and its release describes an India V2V mandate set to enter into full force by October 2028. That date exists. It comes from a Ministry of Road Transport and Highways draft notification issued on 3 August 2026. What the release does not say is that the notification is a draft, that the standard the mandate depends on is not final, and that the association itself asked the ministry in August to break that October 2028 deadline into several milestones with different dates for different vehicle categories. The conference, titled Connecting India for Safer Roads, gathered policymakers, manufacturers, operators and technology providers at a point where the regulatory groundwork is largely laid and the remaining questions concern dates and hardware cost.
What the draft actually says
The proposed amendment to the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989 sets two dates. Vehicles in categories L, M and N manufactured on or after 1 October 2027 must comply with AIS-230 where a manufacturer fits V2V equipment, which makes the first phase voluntary. Vehicles in the same categories manufactured on or after 1 October 2028 must carry V2V equipment conforming to AIS-230. Category L is two-wheelers, M is passenger vehicles and N is goods vehicles, so the second date reaches motorbikes and mopeds, which is unusual internationally and the most difficult part of the programme.
The ministry opened the draft to comment for 30 days and states that it will examine the suggestions before issuing a final notification. Until that notification appears, no mandate exists. This is not a technicality. Draft notifications in Indian vehicle regulation routinely change between publication and finalisation, and this one has an unusually large set of moving parts behind it.
The regulatory scaffolding has been in place for a while, which is why the direction is not in question. The ministry constituted a task force on intelligent transport systems with a specific focus on V2V, drawing on the telecom department, the National Highways Authority, the automotive research bodies, the vehicle manufacturers association, the cellular operators association, the standards bodies and 5GAA itself. It delivered a first report in May 2025 and a final report in January 2026 covering the standards stack, the cybersecurity framework and a phased rollout. The telecom department then agreed in principle to adopt C-V2X as India’s harmonised technology, and asked the regulator in December 2025 for recommendations on how to authorise and price roadside units. Any V2V mandate in India emerges from that chain rather than from a single decision.
Spectrum is the settled part
One element is further along than the release implies. The Department of Telecommunications exempted the 5.875 to 5.925 GHz band from licensing requirements through a notification dated 10 June 2026, so the regulator has partly answered the availability question that the association is still arguing about. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India opened a consultation on a Department of Telecommunications reference of 1 December 2025. The question it examines is narrower than spectrum availability: how roadside units should be authorised and priced.
The division is deliberate and sensible. On-board units inside vehicles are exempt from licensing so that any manufacturer can fit them without an individual permit. Roadside units, which sit on government-owned land and control interference across a corridor, require authorisation, and the ministry’s letter of 20 November 2025 proposed restricting that authorisation to central and state governments or agencies they designate. The regulator is working through the commercial terms of that.
The August submission and the October stage
On 26 August 2026 the association filed its response to the draft notification. It supported the direction and then asked for changes. It noted that AIS-230 remained under development and not yet final, that category L might need additional consideration within the standard, and that aftermarket device fitment should be clarified to accelerate penetration across the existing fleet.
On the dates, it proposed keeping the voluntary October 2027 milestone and keeping October 2028 as an initial mandate milestone, but with what it called a stepwise approach: potentially multiple milestones, a split between new type-approved vehicles and newly manufactured vehicles, and differentiated timelines between vehicle categories, all contingent on the finalisation of AIS-230 and on the results of early deployment.
Two months later, the association’s event release presents October 2028 as the date the industry is gearing up to meet. Both statements can be true at once, because a body can support a direction while negotiating its terms, and asking for a phased schedule is a reasonable position for an industry whose members must certify hardware. But a reader of the October release would not know that the deadline it publicises is one its own author asked the ministry to soften.
What AIS-230 requires
The standard carries the substance behind the date. It covers factory-installed on-board units using C-V2X in the 5.875 to 5.925 GHz band, and specifies radio performance, frequency stability and output power, receiver sensitivity and selectivity, satellite positioning requirements, electrical and power supply requirements, electromagnetic interference and compatibility, cybersecurity and communication security, and performance requirements for road-safety applications.
Four safety use cases come in phases: emergency brake alert, forward collision warning, wrong-way driving alert and emergency vehicle alert. Those are the functions that work before any roadside infrastructure exists, because they travel over the direct vehicle-to-vehicle link rather than through a network. That design choice matters for a country rolling out connectivity unevenly, since a car on a highway with no roadside units can still warn the car behind it.
The two-wheeler problem
Category L is where this gets hard. Two-wheelers dominate India’s fleet, and fitting a powered, certified, cybersecurity-capable radio to a moped is a different engineering and cost problem from fitting one to a car. The electrical system is smaller, the margin is thinner and the unit price matters more to the buyer. Nothing in the public record sets out what that price is.
The standard requires a radio, a positioning receiver, a security module capable of handling certificate provisioning, and the processing to run the safety applications. On a car that bill of materials sits inside a vehicle costing many times more. On a small commuter motorcycle it does not, and the V2V mandate reaches the cheapest vehicles first in volume terms. The association’s own filing singles out category L for additional consideration, and its proposal to differentiate timelines between categories reads as an attempt to give two-wheeler manufacturers more room without abandoning the direction.
The demonstrations
The demonstrations are the thinnest part of the release. Ten members, among them Anritsu, Bosch, HARMAN, Keysight Technologies, Nokia, Qualcomm, Rohde and Schwarz, Rolling Wireless, Tata Motors and Valeo, showed connected vehicles exchanging information about road hazards, traffic conditions and vulnerable road users, and supporting driver assistance and software-defined vehicle functions. That describes a category rather than reporting a result. The release gives no latency or range figures, no test conditions and no indication of which demonstrations ran live and which were simulations.
None of which is to say the demonstrations were not real. Ten companies spanning test equipment, semiconductors, automotive audio, network infrastructure, telematics and two vehicle manufacturers form a broad coalition, and the presence of Anritsu, Keysight and Rohde and Schwarz suggests the certification question is being worked on hardware rather than on paper. But a demonstration is evidence that something can work, not evidence that it will, and a V2V mandate will rest on evidence of the second kind.
What to watch
Three markers. The first is the final notification, because the draft carries no legal force and the ministry has not published the comments it received. The second is AIS-230’s finalisation, since manufacturers cannot meet on schedule a mandate that requires compliance with an unfinished standard. The third is whether the differentiated timelines appear in the final rules, which would show how much of the August position the ministry accepted.
What it means
The direction is not in doubt. The Department of Telecommunications agreed in principle that India would adopt C-V2X as its harmonised technology for intelligent transport, set aside 50 MHz for it, exempted on-board units from licensing and left roadside units to be authorised. A task force drawing on the ministry, the regulator, the standards bodies, the industry association and the chipmakers produced a standard and a draft rule within about two years. What remains is the ordinary last mile of Indian regulation: a final notification, a finished standard, and a decision on how much time two-wheeler manufacturers get. The commercial question that follows is who pays for the roadside layer. On-board units are exempt from licensing, so a manufacturer bears only the hardware and certification cost.
Roadside units require authorisation, and the ministry proposal restricts that to governments and their agencies, which puts corridor infrastructure on the public balance sheet. That is a sensible allocation for a road-safety mandate, and it also means the pace of a V2V mandate depends on state budgets rather than on manufacturer enthusiasm. The mandate will probably arrive in some form. The date is a proposal, and the people who will have to meet it have already asked for more of them.