Yulon Nissan Co Ltd (裕隆日產汽車) and the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology signed a memorandum of cooperation to promote design innovation and resource sharing during the opening ceremony of the fourth annual Yulon Nissan Automobile Design Competition yesterday.
The competition attracts teams of students and professors from universities and colleges across the country. Its popularity has risen since its inception, with 48 schools having entered the contest. A total of 474 teams and about 1,500 participants participated last year.
"The competition is intended to promote innovation, as innovation is the way of the future, as well as the key to success in the international market. It must be promoted in schools," Yulon Nissan president Wu Hsin-fa (
The university will work with Yulon Nissan in promoting mechanical design, information technology, research, academics, as well as sharing equipment and library resources, to benefit students who aspire to become car designers, university president Chen Shi-shuenn (陳希舜) said.
The domestic car design industry is able to tackle minor exterior and interior design changes satisfactorily, but local facilities, experience and resources are not enough when it comes to mechanical testing and design, Steven Yang (楊湘泉), spokesman for Hotai Motor Co (和泰汽車), said by telephone.
Another industry veteran agreed, citing a limited domestic market.
"The domestic market is too small to support a full-fledged car design industry," said Chen Chun-liang (
Sales of new vehicles fell 10.8 percent year-on-year to 326,000 units last year, marking the lowest number of vehicles sold in two decades, data released earlier this month by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications showed.
"Car design is a very specialized field, composed of only a select group of people from major car design centers in Japan, Europe and the United States," Koju Huang (黃興儒), general manager of Yulon Nissan Design Center, said on the sidelines of the ceremony.
"It is not easy for students in Taiwan -- or any other country -- to become car designers without undertaking specialist training in these places," Huang said.
Taiwan could develop an advantage in car design if its competitiveness in Internet and communications technology could be integrated with the automobile industry, said Jeng Jeng-ywan (鄭正元), dean of the university's office of research and development.
Students interested in joining the competition have until April 13 to sign up.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
RSS