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Toyota has invested €85m (£70m) in new European facilities and a test track at its Brussels Technical Centre.
It’s part of the Japanese giants strategy to ‘localise’ cars for the European market, where it wants to further boost sales.
The 1300m track will help Toyota engineers improve the quality and performance of vehicles for European customers, says Kazuhiko Miyadera, senior vice president of R&D at Toyota Motor Europe.
The new Technical Centre, which is built on a former DaimlerChrysler site, will include different driving surfaces to reflect European driving conditions including a rough surface, cobbled section and a ‘low mu’ surface for advanced brake testing.
The new facility, which will help Toyota better tune cars for our roads, emphasises how important European sales are to the firm.
Construction of the new track is likely to start in 2009 and, once completed, it will take on some of the development work currently carried out in Japan, as well as bringing work in-house from third-party test tracks that Toyota is currently forced to use in Europe.
Chris Rosamond
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