Christian von Albrichsfeld, Continental: “We need legislation for autonomous cars in Romania”

“Romania has grown the most in Europe in the last 20 years, but if we look especially at the last years, it has grown much more in consumption than in production, than in work. This is a point where we very clearly need the government’s support.

We must have an environment in Romania that supports investments. We invest almost 150-200 million euros in Romania every year, but the competition with the countries next to us is becoming much tougher.

We must understand that it is not sustainable to have only 5 million people working in a society of 17-18 million people. We must produce more, do research and development in Romania,” Christian von Albrichsfeld, Head of Country, Continental Romania said at Automotive R&D Power Breakfast organized by Automotive Today.

“We have seen the potential that Romania has ever since we started investing 25 years ago. We have over 20,000 employees in the country and more than 8,000 are in research and development and shared services.

We saw the potential and we grew organically, but let’s see what the challenges are. We have a collaboration with the American company Aurora, with which we develop Level 4 autonomous trucks. We are all moving in the direction of autonomous driving, but it’s very hard to do it inside cities. If we are in a more structured environment, things go more smoothly.

We brought an autonomous car a year and a half ago in Timișoara. We have shown that it works. But we need legislation that approves and encourages the development of autonomous cars.

We have to test these cars on the highways, we have to have living labs and Romanian legislation does not approve this.

I think that 2024 will be an interesting year, we are preparing to be more efficient. Competition is very high in the automotive sector, and we believe that this market will grow. All companies are fighting to be more and more competitive. I believe that these are very interesting times for employees, because they can work with different solutions and technologies: cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, big data management, high-performance computers, software defined vehicles, etc.”