Shaping Safety, Starting Out: What Early Career Teaches About Real-World Safety
In 2011, safety was barely part of India’s automotive vocabulary.
The crash worthiness safety regulations had been drafted but not enforced, and most cars sold domestically lacked even basic airbags. Carmakers chased affordability and fuel economy, not survival. The consequences were visible: India recorded 4.97 lakh road accidents and 1.42 lakh deaths, according to the Transport Ministry. When Global NCAP later tested India’s best-sellers, several returned zero-star ratings, exposing just how far the market lagged global standards.
That same year, Praveen Kumar Nigam, fresh out of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, joined Mahindra Research Valley in Chennai. With a background in Aerospace Engineering, he chose to work in Crash Safety, driven by the belief that engineering should save lives, not just create machines. His first assignment on Mahindra’s XUV500 put that conviction into practice by translating simulation and testing into real protection. For a young engineer, it was the perfect collision between purpose and profession.
From Equations to Crashes
Unlike most newbies who ease into corporate life, Nigam’s introduction to work was a deafening boom: his first crash test. “I’d run simulations for weeks. Then I watched the real car fold exactly as the model predicted,” he says, still animated at the memory. “That’s when I realized engineering wasn’t abstract, it was the difference between a bruise and a broken leg.”
The XUV500 is not just another Mahindra project. It is the company’s first “world SUV,” designed for customers in markets like Australia and South Africa. That meant it had to face Australia NCAP, the same consumer test program that scrutinized Japanese and European rivals.
The Pedal That Kicked Back
What Nigam and his colleagues found in those early tests was worrying: in a frontal crash, the brake pedal snapped back toward the driver’s legs. “It was a hidden danger. People think of airbags, but even the pedal can betray you if it’s not engineered right.”
In fact, Nigam had already seen it before the lab did. “In my occupant simulations I could show the pedal intrusion clearly. I used that evidence to persuade the team that the same thing would happen in real tests,” he says. By flagging the risk early, the team verified the issue, understood the injury potential, and started working on fixes before too many prototypes were wasted.
The solution was frugal but effective: a pedal catcher to control the arc of movement, plus reinforcements in the toe-board. “We couldn’t just throw weight or cost at the problem,” he recalls. “We had to think smarter, not heavier.”
Milliseconds That Matter
Then came the restraints, the belts and airbags. To Nigam, they were like musicians in an orchestra. “Crash safety is a symphony in milliseconds. If the pretensioner is late or the airbag is early, the whole piece is out of tune.”
Through a series of simulations, fine-tuned deployment timing, load-limiter levels, and airbag inflation pressure. Even recalibrated the ECU to the crash pulse refined in simulation. The result: cleaner head and chest injury scores, and dummies that “moved as planned.”
When Sensors Weren’t Enough
There was another challenge: measuring how a car rotates in a crashis not as simple as bolting a gyroscope sensor. In practice, tests require multiple sensors spread across the vehicle and many gyro sensors drive up cost.
Nigam drew on his academic background and co-authored a study on a gyro-free method using accelerometers and algorithms, which he presented at MATLAB EXPO 2012.
“If you can’t afford to buy the signal in hardware, you earn it with math.” Nigam Says
That improvement tightened our simulation-to-test correlation without stuffing the car with expensive instrumentation and it scaled cleanly into later test rounds.
Holding the Line in 2015
In 2012, the XUV500 walked away with a 4-star ANCAP rating, at that time the best for an Indian SUV. But for Nigam, the bigger test was sustaining this safety performance.
By 2015, a facelifted XUV500 rolled out with stronger credentials: dual airbags and ABS standard, stability control and side/curtain airbags for higher trims, and refinements in dashboard and steering column mountings. The improvements built directly on the lessons of 2011–2012.
“It wasn’t about chasing a higher rating, it was about making safety consistentacross trims, across years,” he says.
More Than Just Stars
For Nigam, the real takeaway wasn’t the number. “Four stars is nice, but the point is what happens to the family inside. Every millimeter of pedal travel, every millisecond of airbag timing that’s where lives are saved.”
A Career Forged in Crashes
Most young mechanical engineers start with CAD drawings. Nigam started with wrecked SUVs. “At IISc, I learned equations. At Mahindra, I learned what happens when those equations meet a wall,” he says.
The experience defined not just his first job, but his perspective: that in safety engineering, the smallest detail can decide the biggest outcome.
