News

Aisin Seiki has inaugurated its new laboratory building, "V-Lab," and held a completion ceremony on July 31. The "V" stands for Verification (of the accuracy of designs); Validation (of effectiveness and value); and Virtual Company.

Aisin has many development sites in Japan, including offices for design development at Kariya where the Head Office is located; the Fujioka Proving Ground (Toyota City, Aichi) and Toyokoro Proving Ground (Nakagawa-gun, Hokkaido) as comprehensive proving grounds; Kyushu Development Center (Kitakyushu City) for development of electrical systems; and Daiba Development Center (Tokyo) for development of AI technologies.

The newly opened laboratory building "V-Lab" in Kariya, in the same district as the Head Office, aims to shift from conventional development, focused on individual components, to development dealing with large systems on a vehicle level. The Aisin Group will utilize this facility as a special strategic zone for the next-generation development projects, and pursue development of new products and technologies in the future development vision, including Zero Emissions, Automated Driving, and Connected Cars.

V-Lab consists of three floors: the Idea Discovery Floor with the latest measurement, analysis and modeling devices; the Function and Performance Experiment Floor, where employees can quickly find optimum values using the latest model-base development method* and develop functions; and the Actual Driving Confirmation Floor, where employees can validate products' degree of comfort in situations like those of real vehicles and reproduce actual temperature and moisture environments, in order to thoroughly benchmark vehicles and products around the world and realize product ideas. Moving forward, we will propose more products to automobile manufacturers and accelerate development of new products even further, while working with the test-run roads that have already opened in the facility.

*Model-base development method: This is a development process that flows from upstream to downstream (from planning to design to verification) without going back to the previous step, through integration of simulations and a range of tests.

[Outline of the facility]
1. Facility name: Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd. V-Lab
2. Date of completion: July 31, 2017
　 (to go into operation progressively beginning in August 2017)
3. Location: 2-1, Asahi-cho, Kariya, Aichi
4. Description of business: Development of new products and technologies by the entire Aisin Group