1919-22A grandfather reaches Germany. He had lost his own father early, left rural Tamil Nadu for an engineering degree in Chennai, then the Indian Institute of Science in the years when Raman was there, and went on to a doctorate in electrical engineering in a Germany still in ruins from the first war.
1964-65Mount Road, Chennai, in a photograph. Sumantran still uses it in a lecture. The city's main artery carries light traffic, but it has broad paved footpaths, a cycle lane and a proper pedestrian crossing. All of it designed into the road before the rush to grow.
1970sCar-mad in a country with two or three brands of car. He tuned motorcycles for the Sholavaram races before he was old enough to ride one, pedalled ten kilometres to the British Council library to see whether the airmail Autocar had landed, and held a student pilot licence at seventeen and a half. The same decade the oil crisis and the fatality numbers forced fuel economy, emissions and safety onto the industry, by regulation.
1985The PhD is finished in a hurry, at 26. GM Research had interviewed him a year into the doctorate and told him to go finish it, they would still be there. He worked flat out because the job was already waiting, and so never applied for one.
1989-90Immersive VR inside a lab he compares to Bell Labs. Haptic caves where you turned a knob and felt the resistance, and the first fully arbitrary-geometry finite volume CFD code, written with Imperial College twenty years before anything like it was sold as a product.
2001Sixteen years at GM end and he comes back to India. Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland follow, and with them the Indica and the Nano launches where he finally met the motorsport journalists he had read as an obscure eighteen-year-old.
2010Frugal engineering gets its name. Carlos Ghosn took the phrase to the press and said he had found the thing in India. Sumantran wants it institutionalised rather than left as an anecdote, the way Japan turned a shortage of land into just-in-time and a seven-minute die change.
2013-14The sabbatical gets a blunt answer. He took time out to write the architecture of the future auto industry, pulling in two MIT professors, Charlie Fine among them, for academic rigour. Large-city populations from Tokyo to Paris to London answered who cares. The question was rewritten as mobility, which dragged the authors into urban planning and into a first chapter contrasting London with a Los Angeles eight times its size.
2050Four of every six people live in cities. One in six did in 1900. India builds its roads and infrastructure over the next twenty to thirty years, which is the only reason its urban form is still choosable, and his warning is that past a certain level of sprawl the remedy costs too much and a floor of CO2 emissions is hardwired into any level of activity you want.
