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The Joint AdVenture in Shanghai - III
Lei • 25.Januar, 2008 @ 11:27 • Abgelegt unter: Forschung und Entwicklung
AdVenture 3: Have you driven a Chinese car?
“I am going to throw up…” screamed a trainee in the little bus I am driving. All the others are happily riding – let’s say, happily jumping on their seats (inside the car), because the lanes are that rough.
One of the stops we had at UAES was the engineering center, where we were told that there are two back-to-back shifts in the application department, which is unthinkable in Germany. But this is China, everything is possible (the next sentence in a cultural training is usually, “but nothing comes easy”.:) We are all fascinated by the mixture of cars, from big and small Chinese manufacturers to European or American joint-venture OEMs. We sped up through the engineering center, because nobody could wait to test those cars. The test track was nothing like the one I have seen in Boxberg, a Bosch test track in Baden-Württemberg. There, one could drive a Mercedes on a curved road with 40 degree slope at up to 250km, which we tried at another ToST. Here in China, the test track consists of 6 lanes of different roughness conditions and one fast lane, where one can speed up to 80km. It may be laughable for the Germans, but this is the most common kind of road conditions in China and is the most practical way to test engine performance here. Of course, these are not the only tests. UAES also take cars to the highway, test them on deserts in Northern China and in Tibet, where the altitude does not drop below 3500meter. Any EMS (Engine Management System) out of UAES has gone through many extreme conditions - an “Iron Car” indeed.
Then came our bumpy experience on the test tracks. Granted the cars we tested are not all ready, imagine the kind of work the engineers have to put in! I understand now, the kind of challenges the engineers are facing here. It is easy for a premium OEM supplier to ignore or even laugh at these challenges, where most of the time we are talking about state-of-the-art technology, how to make a car driving on highways with no speed limit quieter and even faster. But innovation does not only mean making new, fancy things for Porsche or Maserati, it also means finding the best and cheapest solution to meet the challenges of the market. Here the market is a 1.3 billion population where the majority still could not afford even a 3000Euro car. If we can find a way to win this market, nobody in the end would remember whether we supply to BMW or BAW.
