Less than 18 months after the cornerstone was laid, the Continental Powertrain Division yesterday inaugurated a new Test and Development Center for transmission control units at the headquarters of the Transmission Business Unit in Nuremberg. The international automotive supplier has invested approximately €7.5 million in the building and test facilities, which will employ 200 staff. The nine laboratories, with an effective floor area of 2,500 square meters, include a hydraulic test bed and a prototyping center which provides a complete range of facilities including rapid prototyping. The new Development Center will allow close cooperation between R&D engineers and production staff, so that a robust and efficient production process can be delivered for all products from the outset. “This state-of-the-art center will allow us to offer our customers around the world sustained support in bringing new, top-quality systems and technologies to market even faster,” said Dr. Elmar Degenhart, Chairman of the Executive Board of Continental AG, at the official opening.
Highest standards of quality and robustness despite shrinking development times
Continuing globalization, an extremely competitive operating environment and increasing hybridization mean that worldwide, vehicles and transmissions alike are being built in an ever increasing number of different versions. As a result, development and testing cycles are constantly shrinking. The new Continental Test and Development Center will help meet these tighter time frames. It gives the automotive supplier new, fast and highly efficient prototyping capabilities. Services such as rapid prototyping and specialist prototype design by highly trained employees allow top-quality test prototypes to be built more quickly than ever.
“By building prototypes faster, we can maximize the valuable time window our customers need for testing,” said Rudolf Stark, Head of the Transmission Business Unit. But despite the shorter development times, the scope of testing will remain as extensive as ever. “This is a red line for us, because the testing phase is the most important step in the product engineering process to influence the quality and robustness of a component,” Stark added.
The test facilities also include new system test benches for transmission development. These allow the entire transmission system, rather than just the electronics, to be tested. As a result, the engineers can now assess the entire sequence of functions, from the initial gear shift command through to the application of hydraulic pressure at the shift actuators to engage the next gear. This new, complete-systems capability is not only of vital importance when it comes to developing new products. It also allows any feedback on experiences when the product is in service to be analyzed more comprehensively and faster. The results can then be fed into ongoing improvements to the relevant systems and modules.
Nuremberg is lead plant for transmission and hybrid technologies
The new Test and Development Center also has important implications on the production side. Both R&D and production engineers will be able to utilize the close proximity between the Development Center and the plant’s production lines to ensure that new product designs are production-friendly from the outset. “From Nuremberg, we can then roll out efficient, stable production processes worldwide,” said Rainer Pühl, Nuremberg Plant Manager. “As ‘lead plant’, Nuremberg is responsible not only for product development but also for defining the production processes for all the components and modules built at the site. That applies not just to the Transmission Business Unit but to the Hybrid Electric Vehicle Business Unit as well, both of which are based here in Nuremberg.”
The trends towards automated driving and hybridization will result in a further increase in the demand for electric drive components and self-shifting transmissions. Since both the Transmission and the Hybrid Electric Vehicle Business Units are headquartered here, the Nuremberg plant is ideally placed to exploit synergies. “This latest investment documents the company’s faith in the long-term future of the Nuremberg plant,” said Rainer Pühl. “In the course of its 20-year existence, this relatively young plant has already built up a successful track record. But the best is still to come.”
In all, the Nuremberg plant provides work for almost 2,100 employees, over 400 of them recruited in the past four years alone. The 28 dedicated production lines will turn out more than two million transmission controllers this year, among a total output of some 3.6 million items of equipment. Together they comprise roughly one billion components, which means that every day the plant processes approximately three million components.
