It Sure Looks Like Suzuki Might Help Bring American Robocars To India

The agreement with a San Francisco-based tech firm backed by Sam Altman is only at the 'memorandum of understanding' phase, but still.

Photo by: Suzuki

By: Janaki Jitchotvisut

Jul 14, at 7:40am ET

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Can you believe that it's been more than a decade since Suzuki sold its cars in the US? Me neither; in fact, I just had to go look it up again to be sure of when that happened. Suzuki announced it would no longer sell cars in the US all the way back in 2012. While they remain quite popular in plenty of other markets, no such luck for us on this side of the pond.

Still, that doesn't mean Suzuki has given up on the US entirely. We still get their motorcycles, of course, as well as their quads. Apparently, it also doesn't preclude Suzuki from teaming up with another American firm to bring a new public transit solution to India, where it also already sells both its motorbikes and its cars.

Public transit, you say? As in buses or trains? No; although if this plan does go through as it's currently being discussed, it will involve the use of a multimodal transit hub that connects to a proposed bullet train. This project, called the Sabarmati Multimodal Hub, is currently in the process of being built, and is planned to encompass multiple types of rail system (long-range bullet trains, a metro system, and more), as well as road-going transit options to help travelers get wherever they need to go.

How is Suzuki involved? On July 1, 2026, Suzuki Motors Corporation announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to start working on studies toward the goal of bringing a personal public transportation system to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, where the Sabarmati Multimodal Hub is currently planned to be built. The MOU also involves Thoth Infrastructure Private Limited, which is an India-based transit development firm, as well as San Francisco-based Glydways, a self-driving robocar firm backed by Sam Altman.

In case you aren't familiar with multimodal transit hubs, the entire point is that you, as a user, can utilize different types of transit from one convenient station. Instead of the need to go to this station to catch the local train across the city, or walk a few blocks away to catch a particular bus, you can instead do it all in one place.

Sabarmati plans to go beyond the usual mix of public transit options by incorporating those Glydways self-driving robocars; at least, depending on how the transit studies go. As it's described in the press release, the proposed system will "enable the transport of multiple passengers through efficient autonomous operation of mini-vehicle-size compact electric vehicles on dedicated lanes. The system can be introduced at lower cost, while also contributing to alleviating traffic congestion and reducing environmental impact."

Lower cost than what, exactly? Existing personal transit options, such as buses and auto-rickshaws? Clearly, if you're going to build a new system that incorporates long-distance, high-speed travel, such as a bullet train, then you're going to need to account for how to transport higher volumes of people to more local destinations. I get that, for sure.

As to how the program will evolve, that remains to be seen. While Glydways has had investment from Suzuki since 2024, it's also an incredibly young (and untested) company. A startup, if you will. Going back through its own archives, you can find lots of optimistic press releases about its plans to bring its self-driving pod systems to lots of places: San Jose Airport, metro Atlanta, Miami, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Newark Liberty International Airport, and so on.

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But all of those projects are still currently in the early stages, and none of them has come to fruition yet at the time of writing. And even in discussing these forward-looking projects, most are referred to as pilot projects; in other words, things to be tested and tried, and then hopefully improved upon as the kinks get worked out.

That's also why the image provided with this press release, which you can see above, is so clearly a render of a utopian vision of the Sabarmati Glydways implementation, and not a photo (or even really a design schematic) of tangible objects. As to what this will entail, how well its systems will work, what privacy concerns they may be in our age of near-constant global surveillance; all of that remains to be seen.