Hyundai opens Indian R&D facility to develop small cars



Over the past decade, Hyundai has rapidly moved up into the top echelon of the worlds automakers and part of its success has come from better tailoring its cars to local needs. To help in that respect, the South Korean company has opened a network of technical centers in the regions where it does business.

Last week, Hyundai opened it fourth R&D facility outside of Korea with its new location in Hyderabad, India. The Indian center will focus on developing small cars and the home office has named it the global center of excellence for the segment.

The Hyderabad Center is starting off with 300 engineers and will also be providing support services to other locations in South Korea, Japan, Germany and the United States. The 300,000 square-foot facility took two years to build at a cost of $25 million.

[Source: Hyundai]

Press Release

HYUNDAI OPENS NEW R&D CENTER IN HYDERABAD

- US$25 million facility aims to become global centre of excellence for small car engineering

(Oct. 29, 2009 - Hyderabad, India) Hyundai Motor Company opened a new research and development center at Hyderabad in India, the company's fourth overseas R&D center.

Set up with a US$ 25 million investment and located in the HITECH City of Hyderabad, the new 200,000 square-foot facility, Hyundai Motor India Engineering Pvt. Ltd (HMIE), will further accelerate local content development and enable Hyundai to respond even more quickly to changing customer needs across the world.

The new facility, which was completed in April after 25 months of construction, will serve as an important platform for the development of sub-compact cars in order to meet surging demand. Located about 800 km northwest of Hyundai Motor India's Chennai production plant, it will further facilitate the development of India as Hyundai's global hub for manufacturing and engineering of small cars.

This newly created R&D center will also support all back-end operations like computer aided engineering (CAE), computer aided design (CAD) and help the R & D work taking place across Hyundai's car lineup. In addition, it will provide vehicle development including styling, engineering design and vehicle test & evaluation for cars manufactured in India to satisfy the specific needs of the Indian customers. This state-of-the-art center currently employs about 300 engineers and Hyundai plans to gradually increase this number, strengthening its operations.

Hyundai's other overseas R&D centers are located in the United States, Germany and Japan.

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