Technology company Continental is expanding the worldwide network of its research and development centres. On Wednesday, the company opened a new location in San José in Silicon Valley, California, USA, where up to 300 experts from all parts of the company will work on pioneering solutions for the sustainable mobility of the future. Their projects are concerned with automated driving, electromobility, connectivity and mobility services.

“Our attention is focused on developing and shaping the environment of future mobility. At our new center in Silicon Valley, we connect our customer’s wishes, contributions and orders with our innovative ideas, knowledge, energy and experience of over 32,000 of our engineers worldwide and our business partners – for the benefit of all,” said Continental’s Corporate Technology Officer, Kurt Lehmann.

Continental  says it is investing millions of US dollars in the new R&D centre. The state-of-the-art laboratories, workshops and offices are housed in a complex of around 6,000 square metres. Continental has already been represented in Silicon Valley for several years, as the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) business unit has been based there since 2014.

Lehmann said that the new R&D centre forms an important building block in implementing Continental’s strategy to develop pioneering technologies for transporting people and their goods. Software-based solutions, handling large amounts of data and using artificial intelligence play a vital role in this.

“The automotive industry is undergoing the biggest transformation in its 130-year history. In the past, it created value primarily using mechanical solutions. It then increased this value with help from sensors, electronics, software and digitalisation. In the future, our business will be driven by mobility services and intelligent mobility technologies,” explained Lehmann, who has been responsible for corporation-wide technology development at Continental.

He added, “Over the coming decades, most of the electrically powered, fully connected and automated vehicles in cities will be operated by mobility service providers and fleet managers. Continental connects vehicles’ ‘brains’, thus expanding the collective intelligence of the fleet. This is the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration taking place across Continental in San José, and it will result in new, additional business areas for our pioneering solutions.”

Continental employs more than 18,000 people in the U.S.A. In the past five years, the company has invested more than $1.9 billion there and is planning comparably large investments for the next five years.