With around 37% of passenger vehicles sold in 2024 coming with embedded cellular connectivity, India’s car ecosystem is becoming increasingly connected. These vehicles constantly generate and consume data—from maps and media to telematics and safety logs. In regions with inconsistent network coverage, edge storage ensures that critical systems like ADAS, navigation, infotainment, and fleet compliance continue to function reliably by storing and processing data locally.
Why Connected Cars Need Storage at the Edge
Industry trackers frequently report tens of gigabytes of data per vehicle per hour in active use. Given the inconsistent network coverage on Indian highways, tunnels, and rural areas, pushing all of this to the cloud in real-time is impractical and can lead to safety issues. Edge storage provides a solution, so that safety perception, driver-state inference, and recent context data are instantly available without a round-trip. When back in network, a vehicle can store-and-forward data, summaries or flagged events, for diagnostics and continuous improvements.
From Maps to Music: Infotainment That Works Offline
A responsive cockpit depends on local caches: HD map tiles, route history, traffic layers, voice models, and user libraries. With these assets on fast flash and UFS at the edge, assistants respond without cloud latency and playlists do not stall in patchy zones – this is important in a country like India, where signal quality changes block to block. The design pattern is simple: pre-position heavy assets on the vehicle and sync in the background when connectivity allows. This improves quality and lets OEMs ship features that feel “instant” regardless of signal.
In addition to infotainment, modern connected vehicles constantly share location, performance, and safety data with central systems for tracking and analytics. But in real-world driving, mobile networks can drop out. That is why most tracking units now store location, health, and event logs locally inside the vehicle, then automatically upload them once connectivity returns. The result is continuous, reliable data for fleet managers and safety teams, ensuring nothing gets lost when the signal fades.
Software-Defined Vehicles enabled by storage
Today, cars update their software on the go, just like smartphones. The over-the-air (OTA) software updates add new features, enhance security, and improve the car’s performance. This process relies on automotive-grade flash storage, technology built to handle continuous data writing and verification even in harsh automotive environments. When the car is connected to your home WiFi, it can easily update overnight. This results in a smoother ride, better features, and fewer service visits, saving a lot of time. To maintain this data when on the road and out of connectivity range, the vehicle uses tough, automotive-grade storage to save the update and hold a backup before installing.
India’s connected-cars are about more than smarter dashboards and internet-ready features, they are about reliability on every drive. The real progress happens behind the scenes, where on-board storage or edge storage quietly helps keep a vehicle safe, responsive, and connected even when mobile networks drop. Automakers can speed up safety alerts, improve infotainment, and increase the reliability of tracking systems by creating cars that can think and act locally.
