Continental Application Development Center in Budapest

The Continental Group opened an Application Development Center in Budapest on Monday with Hungarian state support to develop cutting-edge software solutions for traffic accident prevention.

The director of the Continental Group in Hungary, Róbert Keszte says that the acceptance of self-driving technologies in Europe is not yet widespread, and that this must change. Róbert Keszte also called it an important task to transform Continental from an industrial company into a technology company, because, as he said, the cars of the future will compete not in terms of horsepower but in terms of software sophistication. Of course, the company is not neglecting its traditional areas of operation and is confident that it can continue its mutually beneficial cooperation with the Hungarian government, he added.    

Ghada Elramly, the European head of the company's driver assistance and automated driving solutions business, said the new Budapest center will have important tasks to perform, with complex projects ranging from development and testing to cybersecurity.    

Continental has been developing its centers with state support. Hungarian taxpayers are contributing HUF 1 billion to the company's HUF 4.2 billion investment. The company decided in 2017 to set up an Artificial Intelligence Development Centre under the area of driver assistance and automated driving solutions. The Application Development Center, which was inaugurated on Monday, is part of the same field.     

The German automotive group is present in more than 50 countries worldwide and employs almost 200,000 people. In Hungary, it employs more than 8,000 people and, in addition to its development centers, operates a tire sales center in Budaörs, a tire sales center in Budapest, a factory in Makó, Nyíregyháza, Vác in Szeged and a factory in Veszprém.