Technology company Continental today inaugurated its greenfield plant in Pune, India. The company said in a statement that the plant is for manufacturing surface solutions materials for the Indian automotive and two-wheeler market.  

With investments totalling about INR 2 billion covering facilities and machinery, Continental will produce premium surface materials for car interiors, including electric vehicles, as well as two-wheeler seats, catering primarily to the domestic market and exports, the release said. 

“Growing our business in the Asia-Pacific region is one of our main strategic pillars. Amongst others, India will play a major role to strive for our goal. That’s why we continue to invest into our Indian locations. Thus, we will remain close to our customers maximising value creation,” said Philip Nelles, Member of the Continental Executive Board and Head of Group Sector ContiTech, at the inauguration ceremony in Pune. 

Dr. Dirk Leiss, heading the business area Surface Solutions, said: “Premium vehicle interiors are increasingly becoming important for car users. Our surface material provides both, luxury and comfort, improving the overall driving experience.”  

The new location is Continental’s sixteenth surface solutions plant globally, producing surface materials like Acella Eco used by worldwide top car manufacturers and automotive brands. 

Dr. Leiss added: “Our surface solutions come with the guarantee of state-of-the-art quality and heritage of more than 300 years in the industry.” 

Prashanth Doreswamy, President and CEO, Continental India, said, “Continental has been growing steadily in the Indian market. We have now invested in Pune, a significant and long-established hub for the automotive industry, and we aim to be our customers’ first partner of choice for surface solutions. With this, we reaffirm our commitment to the local market, aligned to our ‘in the market, for the market’ philosophy.” 

The 149,000 square feet manufacturing facility, with an initial annual capacity of five million square meters of surface material can be scaled up to 10 million square meters.  

Landry Tchapda, head of the surface solutions plant management, said, “We are committed to our environment and are doing a lot to ensure that we are constantly reducing our carbon footprint. The new plant features best-in-class energy efficiency standards, sustainable production processes, an ergonomic work environment, 100 percent sewage and wastewater treatment as well, exhaust air treatment of all processes, and use of energy from renewable source.” 

Tchapda added, “With skilled workforce and cutting-edge technology at our disposal, our production is world-class, to cater to the requirements of our customers. In addition to production, storage, logistics, purchasing, and sales, we have also scheduled resources and capacities for laboratories, design and product development. India is a promising market to grow. So, we expand our operations at a rapid pace. Our innovative surface solutions are available for a variety of car interior and two-wheeler applications and we strive to be making us the market leader in near future.” 

The plant will primarily manufacture Acella Eco and Acella Lux material, which add aesthetic value to vehicle interiors. Eco-friendly foam foil Yorn and Yorn Light will also be produced in the near future. (MT)

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Coretura, a 50:50 joint venture between Daimler Truck and Volvo Group, has entered into an engineering agreement with Accenture to accelerate the development of a software platform for commercial vehicles.

The company, headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, currently employs over 100 engineers. It continues to recruit specialists in system architecture, high-performance computing and cloud infrastructure to support its roadmap, which targets the delivery of its first commercialised products towards the end of the decade.

Coretura intends to create a single software platform, language and standard for trucks, buses and other heavy-duty transport vehicles. The platform is designed to support vehicle lifecycles of more than 15 years, moving the industry away from projects that require custom software development for each new vehicle.

As the engineering partner, Accenture will support development across several areas, including:

• Electrical and Electronic (E/E) architecture
• Software abstraction and hardware integration
• Embedded software, middleware, and cybersecurity
• Functional safety and cloud infrastructure

The platform aims to provide a reusable software stack to lower costs and standardise time-to-market for global manufacturers. For fleet operators, the system is designed to allow for continuous software updates and performance upgrades delivered over the air.

Johan Lunden, CEO, Coretura, said, “Our purpose is to advance mobility at the speed of ideas, and that takes depth. Building a full-stack SDV platform demands expertise across embedded software, middleware, cybersecurity, and functional safety, all designed for vehicles with lifecycles measured in decades. Accenture’s reinvention capabilities let us move faster without compromising the standards our customers depend on. This is acceleration, not course correction.”

Rainer Oder, SDV Embedded Software Lead, Accenture, added, “Helping the industry advance software-defined vehicles is a priority for Accenture. Our landmark collaboration with Coretura is designed to change embedded software engineering for automotive platforms. Together, we are looking to solve the challenges of a fully software-defined architecture – addressing critical areas such as hardware abstraction, API management and AI-based engineering optimisations.”

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The ePlane Company has announced the completion of its full-scale electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, the e200X. Designated PT-01, the prototype has successfully integrated all core subsystems into a single structure, marking the transition from design and simulation to physical testing.

The e200X is designed as a single airframe versatile enough to serve three distinct markets – Passenger Air Taxi, Urban Cargo Carrier and Air Ambulance.

The company emphasises that the aircraft was designed to be compact, allowing it to integrate into existing urban infrastructure without requiring significant city redesigns.

Developed at the company's own facilities in Chennai, the e200X features in-house development of major components, including propellers, airframe structure, landing gear and battery pack.

This vertical integration provides the company with control over performance, manufacturing costs, and iteration speed, having reached this milestone on approximately USD 21 million in funding.

With assembly complete, the e200X will now undergo ground testing, flight testing and certification.

Prof. Satya Chakravarthy, Founder, The ePlane Company, said, "We set out to build an electric aircraft to a world-class benchmark, engineered and manufactured in depth in India for the World.  We deliberately designed the e200X to be compact, because an aircraft that asks a city to rebuild itself around it will not solve the problem it was built to solve. The same airframe can move people as an air taxi, carry goods as a cargo aircraft, and save lives as an air ambulance, and it can do all three using the infrastructure cities already have. That combination of real capability and capital efficiency is how we intend to compete, and win, in markets around the world.”

The company’s board includes prominent figures such as Vishesh Rajaram (Speciale Invest), Eash Sundaram (JetBlue) and Aditya Ghosh (Homage, Akasa Air). The venture, incubated at IIT Madras, has also received international recognition, including being showcased at Bharat Innovates 2026 and featured in Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote.

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Chinese technology company Xiaomi has marked a new milestone for its automotive product offering with its electric vehicle.

The company has announced a significant milestone in autonomous vehicle technology by completing the first official autonomous lap of the Nurburgring Nordschleife circuit in Germany with the Xiaomi YU7 GT, equipped with a Track Package, navigating the 20.8 km circuit without a human driver, recording a lap time of 10:29.483.

Following this performance, the Nurburgring has introduced a new official vehicle category: Autonomous Driving (under Electric Vehicles).

The Xiaomi YU7 GT autonomously navigated all 73 corners of the Nordschleife, managing 300 metres of elevation change and varying road surface conditions. The performance was driven by Xiaomi’s autonomous driving system, which integrates the Xiaomi XLA architecture and the MiMo-Embodied foundation model introduced in March 2026. The end-to-end architecture enabled the vehicle to coordinate steering, braking and power delivery in real-time, maintaining stability under high-speed and high-load conditions.

Xiaomi’s autonomous driving programme has evolved since the 2024 launch of Xiaomi HAD. The current system moves beyond simple behaviour imitation toward autonomous decision-making and deeper environmental interpretation. The company stated that the Nurburgring project serves as a critical testing ground to collect data for refining vehicle dynamics modelling, control strategy optimisation and safety redundancy mechanisms.

This achievement underscores Xiaomi’s commitment to advancing artificial intelligence in the automotive sector through rigorous real-world validation.

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QuantumScape Corporation has announced a multi-year joint research agreement with Honda R&D Co., a subsidiary of Honda Motor Co.

The collaboration focuses on advancing QuantumScape’s solid-state lithium-metal battery platform, including the development of associated manufacturing processes.

This agreement follows a successful technology evaluation period during which Honda conducted a technical study and competitive benchmarking of QuantumScape’s battery platform.

Atsushi Ogawa, Chief Operating Officer, Research Center of Excellence, Honda R&D Co, said, “QS technology demonstrated compelling and unique advantages during our evaluation. We see potential for QS technology to add value across a range of applications, including automotive, and we are excited to move forward into the next phase of our partnership.”

Dr. Siva Sivaram, CEO and President, QuantumScape, added, “Honda is a leading global automaker renowned for its engineering excellence and product quality across automotive and other applications worldwide, and its evaluation represents one of the most rigorous assessments of our technology to date. This agreement reflects the growing confidence in QS solid-state lithium-metal batteries to enable safer, higher-density energy storage.”

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