TRW Opens China Test Facility

TRW Automotive Holdings has announced the opening of a new test track in Heihe, northern China. Work at the site began in 2006 and TRW states that during the last three years a “significant investment” has been made in the facility. The track specialises in winter testing and includes a variety of track surfaces designed to test active safety systems such as advanced braking and steering systems and integrated vehicle control and driver assist technologies. According to TRW, the opening of the test track, which is to receive support from the company’s Shanghai technical centre engineers, completes its footprint to locally engineer products and applications for China-based customers.

“Heihe offers world-class testing conditions and boasts one of the broadest ranges of testing surfaces in the Asia Pacific region,” stated Nancy Gougarty, TRW vice president of Asia Pacific Operations. “We are proud to be able to support our China domestic and international customers locally with their product development requirements. Having a test track here in China means we can greatly reduce the time and costs of our winter testing, while developing new and enhanced safety systems for the domestic and global markets.”

The facility is situated on approximately 350 acres, comprised of around 320 acres of lake tracks and 30 acres of land tracks. The location includes a dynamic area, a handling track, ice testing circles of 200 and 500 metres in diameter, and packed ice, polished ice and mue-split surfaces designed for active safety systems development.

“The new test track greatly improves our in-house winter testing capability,” explained Jim Luo, general manager of TRW’s Asia Pacific technical centre. “It will provide our engineers with a local research and data gathering facility and serve as a technical assessment centre where we can work collaboratively to review and discuss vehicle performance directly with our customers.”

The track is situated in China’s Heilongjiang Province, and brings the number of TRW global test sites to twelve – six winter test facilities, four warm weather tracks and two all-weather sites.