Taiwan is well placed to benefit from the growing trends in automotive for safety systems and for the potential growth in electric vehicles, believes Kim Tsai, CEO of Mobiletron.

He also said that he saw safety systems that were today offered as extras becoming standard on many cars.

“The customers are requesting safety systems,” he said. “And they want these to be on the vehicle at the start. They say these are a necessity.”

He said that car manufacturers were responding because of the increasing competition in the automotive market.

“The competition is becoming heavy, so every car maker wants to build something unique,” he said. “They are looking at energy consumption and safety features, so more OEMs are now putting these in as standard.”

He said that electronic safety systems had only been introduced into the company’s portfolio in the past few years but they were growing fast. And he said that Taiwan was the place to be to take advantage of that.

“This is a small island but very strong in electronic components,” he said. “They can do everything for producing active and passive components, so there is a stable and accessible supply system. We also have stable engineering and production people.”

He said it was difficult to maintain the tight standards required by the automotive industry without stable people. And he said the country had the research institutions that supplied these people.

“For the future, this is a good place to build modules,” he said. “We have the supply chain and the design support, and can deliver these around the world.”

He said this was one of the reasons Mobiletron managed to sell to the tier two companies.

“I can’t supply a complete engine management system, but we can supply the control modules for the energy management system and ship them to where they are being assembled,” he said.

One growth area in safety systems that the company is banking on is tyre pressure monitoring systems with Europe and China both planning to make these compulsory. And the company reckons that its radio transmitter design gets round the problems with Bluetooth on trucks where the distance between the back wheels and the cabin makes it hard to get a reliable signal.

“We have a specially designed transmitter that can handle the distance through a steel truck,” said Miriam Lu, sales manager. “We need just one antenna to receive the signal from all the wheels.”

The company also makes a tyre pressure monitor for motorcycles.

“With heavy-duty motorcycles, you need to warm up the wheels before going very fast to reduce tyre wear,” she said. “This system shows temperature as well. Most riders don’t understand this and we hope this will help.”

There is also a version with an internet interface via GPRS for fleets so that the central office can see if there is anything unusual.

“Drivers are sometimes lazy about checking tyre pressure,” said Tsai, “but with this the office can alert them to sort it out.”

He said on the electric vehicle market, the small size of the country made it a good testing area for the vehicles and this was backed by government support.

“For the past one and a half years we have seen the Taiwanese government paying attention to electric vehicles and are preparing a budget to support electric vehicles,” he said.