Minus Zero's zPod can drive itself, India's law won't let it

Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra built a car in Bengaluru that can read traffic through cameras alone, decide what to do about an auto rickshaw cutting across its path, and drive itself. It has never been allowed to do that on a public road without a human ready to take over, and under Indian law it may never be.

The two were high school friends who founded Minus Zero in 2021, Open magazine reported, betting that India's roads, pedestrians stepping off medians, bikes weaving through gaps, monsoon rain washing out lane markings, were not a reason to stay away from self driving cars but the hardest test one could face anywhere. Their car, the zPod, carries no lidar turret. It reads the road through a ring of high resolution cameras, trained on millions of unlabelled video frames including dashcam footage and recordings shot in rain, run through a single model that goes straight from what the cameras see to what the car does, with no separate steps for spotting objects, predicting their path and then planning a route. Reehal has said the idea is to choose "from many valid, safe, and socially acceptable options in a complex world," not to match one correct path the way older self driving systems are built to, Open magazine reported.

This matters to a reader in India because most Level 2 driver assistance on Indian roads today is tuned on European or American highways, lane disciplined in a way Indian traffic rarely is. A system trained on Bengaluru's own streets is a different proposition for an Indian car or truck maker than one bought off the shelf from abroad.

Minus Zero had planned to run the zPod itself, in a mode it called Hands Off, Eyes On, the car steering, braking and judging intersections while a human stayed alert rather than gripping the wheel, Open magazine reported. Then in December 2023, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari said autonomous cars would not be allowed in India "in the foreseeable future," according to the same report. India's Motor Vehicles Act has no provision for a car with nobody driving it on a public road, and the zPod, built to go further than that, had nowhere to go.

So Reehal and Kalra turned the car into something they could sell without waiting for the law to catch up: not the zPod, but the software inside it, licensed to companies that already have the right to put vehicles on the road. In March 2024, Minus Zero announced a partnership with Ashok Leyland to fit its platform into the truck maker's commercial vehicles, starting inside ports, factories and corporate campuses where public road rules do not apply, with hub to hub and long haul trucking to follow once regulation allows, Inc42 reported. Ashok Leyland's chief technology officer N Saravanan said "Minus Zero's capabilities and plans impressed us, and we are excited to be working with them to develop India specific solutions, that can be scaled globally," Inc42 reported.

By May 2025, that software had a name, True Vision Autonomy, offered to automakers as a Level 2+ and Level 3 driver assistance stack for trucks, buses and electric vehicles, Minus Zero said on its blog announcing the launch. Describing the camera only approach to Global Indian, Reehal said it "showcases True Vision Autonomy, relying purely on camera sensors, yes, only, for the first time in history," adding that the project "belongs to the entire team at Minus Zero," not just its two co-founders.

The zPod that started it all is still in Bengaluru, still reading the road through cameras alone, still waiting on a law that has not moved. What changed is who gets to use what it learned. It will be a truck on a highway or a bus on a city route that finds out first, not the car it was built for.

Sources