Winter car tests thrive in Yakeshi

By Li Fangfang (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-29 09:50

Bosch, the world's leading supplier of automotive technology, opened its largest Asia-Pacific automotive winter test center in Yakeshi, Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Friday.

With an investment of 150 million yuan, the center allows for cold weather testing of vehicle safety systems for OEM (original equipment manufacturing) customers from China and the Asia-Pacific region.

"We are striving to meet the increasing demand for safety technologies in the Chinese market. This new facility will allow us to introduce the latest safety technologies to China," said Werner Struth, president of Bosch Chassis Systems Control.

"This winter we already have 40 engineers scheduled to work on a large number of projects with Chinese OEMs."

Yakeshi, 1,100km north of Beijing, is an ideal location for winter test facilities, as winter there lasts five months, from November to March. The average temperature is -30 C and snow depth reaches its maximum of 30 cm in February.

Ba Shuhuan, Party head of Yakeshi, told China Daily that the city has plunged 250 million yuan into the first phase of a group of test centers.

"Besides Bosch's center, we will build five more winter test centers for Chinese automakers to test their self-developed technologies," said Ba. The total investment will be 640 million yuan.

The ESP (electronic stability program) installation rate in China is forecast at 7 percent in 2008.