Vehicle-to-pedestrian — the mode with the most to prove in India.
A vulnerable road user is anyone outside a metal shell: a pedestrian, a cyclist, a scooter rider, a motorcyclist, a road worker, a wheelchair user. In India they are the majority of road deaths, and two-wheeler riders alone account for close to half, on MoRTH's Road Accidents in India series. V2P is the mode that addresses them, and it is constrained by a problem the vehicle modes do not have: the device is running on a battery that also has to last the day.
PSM in North America, VAM in Europe.
The Personal Safety Message, SAE J2735 message ID 32 (with PSM2 at 37), has its minimum performance requirements set by SAE J2945/9, Vulnerable Road User Safety Message Minimum Performance Requirements. The European equivalent is the VRU Awareness Message, ETSI TS 103 300-3, currently at V2.3.1 (December 2025), with the VRU basic service architecture in TS 103 300-2. Both are adaptive-rate, 1 to 10 Hz. The message sets in full →
A handset cannot sense the channel continuously for eight hours.
An on-board unit is powered by the vehicle. A phone or a helmet-mounted tag is not. Continuous sensing-based resource selection — the mechanism that makes C-V2X Mode 4 and Mode 2 work — is expensive, because the device must decode control information across a long sensing window before it can choose a transmission resource.
3GPP Release 17 addressed this directly with two features aimed squarely at VRU devices:
- Sidelink DRX — discontinuous reception, so the device can sleep between wake periods rather than listening continuously
- Partial sensing and random resource selection — the device samples a subset of the sensing window, or skips sensing entirely, trading some collision probability for a large power saving
Release 17 was frozen in March 2022, so this is mature specification with silicon following. The release history →
The draft mandate covers L-category vehicles, and that is the point.
MoRTH's 3 August 2026 draft covers categories L, M and N — L being two- and three-wheelers, including sub-100cc scooters. If finalised, it would be the first V2V fitment mandate in the world to cover motorcycles and scooters.
That is simultaneously the most consequential and the most fragile element of the proposal. Consequential, because in a fleet where two-wheelers account for close to half of road deaths, a mandate that excluded them would deliver very little. Fragile, because the estimated ₹5,000–7,000 per-unit cost cited in trade coverage (roughly US$60 to US$85) is a material fraction of the price of an entry-level two-wheeler, and no Indian two-wheeler manufacturer has a publicly announced V2X programme. Expect this to be the most contested part of the consultation. India's V2X framework →
Note that a motorcycle fitted with a factory on-board unit is technically a V2V participant, not a V2P one — it broadcasts a vehicle message from vehicle-grade hardware. V2P remains the mode for pedestrians, cyclists and anyone on foot.
Where this fits.
V2V
What a factory-fitted two-wheeler actually becomes in message terms.
C-V2X
Sidelink DRX, partial sensing, and the Release 17 power work.
India regulation
The L, M and N scope, and why the L category is the contested part.
Message sets
PSM, VAM and where they sit against the vehicle messages.
What V2X is for
The safety pillar, and the two others that fund it.
How V2X works
The warnings-about-people group, in plain language.
Questions this page answers.
What is a vulnerable road user?
In ITS terminology, a road user not protected by a vehicle body — pedestrians, cyclists, e-scooter and motorcycle riders, wheelchair users, and road workers on foot. ETSI's VRU basic service defines VRU profiles and clusters to handle groups.
Does V2P require a special device?
It requires a device with a PC5-capable radio and GNSS. In practice that means either a purpose-built tag, or a smartphone whose modem supports sidelink — which most consumer handsets do not currently expose. This is the main practical obstacle to V2P deployment, and it is a chipset and OS question more than a standards question.
Will V2P drain my phone battery?
That was the original objection, and 3GPP Release 17 was written substantially to answer it, through sidelink DRX and partial sensing. Whether a given implementation is power-acceptable is an implementation question, not a standards one.