Huatai gets brand recognition through clean diesel tech

• Source: CE.cn
• [14:26 January 20 2011]
• Comments

In the 10 years of setting foot in automobile industry, Huatai Automobile was quite of good reputation: Terracan and Santa Fe were in succession chosen to be the commanding car of Chinese peacekeeping troops, and repeatedly be the most popular model of SUV and energy-saving & environment-friendly vehicle. It is a fact needed to be faced up to, that in cooperation with foreign companies the rights of product development and design are always controlled by foreign companies, "Market for technology" is not a sustaining development approach to push forward the industry. 

Huatai Automobile Group observantly sensed that it is to follow others' footstep after all if they have no core technology of power train and just conduct car assembling. To develop and go out, the enterprise must possess its own core technology of power train.

Huatai Automobile timely modified its strategy: fostering its own brand with clean diesel fuel technology and marching into the middle and high end with chassis platform technology. Following the orientation, they made negotiations with many parties and paid unremitting efforts. When international financial crisis swept across the globe, many foreign companies walked with difficulty and hunker down to look for partners. Eventually, Huatai Automobile Group had its wishes fulfilled, it successfully introduced the contemporary most advanced clean diesel technology and patents from Italian VM Company, and automatic transmission technology from Germany ZF Company, filling the gap of domestic market and becoming the automobile manufacturing enterprise possessing the two core technologies and patents.

Huatai Automobile Group then set up engine company immediately and simultaneously recruited the best talent globally, get together the Chinese and foreign experts together in Erdos, and moved the process technology department and engine localization project office which formerly located in Beijing to Erdos, and established the R&D team of engine and transmission project. They invested nearly 1 billion yuan for R&D to accelerate the digestion, absorption and re-innovation of the introduced technologies.

For the last two years, Huatai Automobile once more "adjusted" the high-pressure common rail system, variable area turbocharger system and the structural system. They implemented big and small innovative improvements for more then 100 items, and eventually localized the introduced technologies: for adapting different models, the engine can be transversally or longitudinally mounted; for adapting different fuels, both "refined grain" and " coarse grain" can be used; for adapting different terrain, the engine can work at areas of 2000 or 5000 meters above sea level; for adapting different climate, the tolerable temperatures was adjusted from the lowest minus 25 centigrade and the highest 40 centigrade to minus 30 centigrade and 50 centigrade respectively.

Meanwhile, it researched and developed the state-of-the-art 6-speed automatic transmission independently, and pushed the domestic clean diesel passenger car technology to a new level. The technology export manufacturer firstly declared that they would order 10,000 sets of equipment every year from here.

After two years of construction, in Erdos, Huatai Automobile Group had built the production base of diesel passenger car engines of Euro IV or Euro V standards at top international level with an annual output of 300,000 and the production base of automatic transmission with an annual output of 450,000, thus realized the industrialization of introduced technology and patent. Huatai Automobile Group will reach the production capacity of annual output of 350,000 clean diesel passenger cars. The automobile expert Zhang Xiaoyu highly praised on the Huatai diesel powertrain off-line ceremony: "the establishment of production line of diesel engine and transmission in Huatai Automobile Group had realized the Chinese automobile makers' dream of several generations."