The automotive industry in Asia experiences in rapid growth for the last few years, meanwhile Taiwanese automakers gradually enter into cooperation with international automakers to grab market share in Asia with excellent performance. However the key automotive components still depend on the supply of the large foreign automakers.

To combine the industrial, official, academic and research sectors and jointly facilitate the development of the automotive industry, the Department of Industrial Technology, Ministry of Economic Affairs (DOIT/MOEA) urged the four most important research institutes to join together as a research consortium. On May 30, 2005, Taiwan Automotive Research Consortium (TARC) was formally established. In including:

The main targets of TARC include:
(1) establish the integrated platform for automotive technology research and development,
(2) with international cooperation and technology transfer, assist the parts industry to set up the concurrent engineering design platform,
(3) assist the local universities and colleges to establish the talents cultivation and innovative research platform.

These three platforms will be integrated by technical capabilities of TARC and put into development step by step. The integration combines the clean powertrain and chassis modules technology, the safety protection and electronics technology, the lightweight and engine RP/RT technology, the vehicle testing and style design technology.

Through integration, TARC completes a t-car as research benchmarking to demonstrate the independent capabilities of vehicle design and manufacturing in Taiwan. TARC hopes to lead the parts suppliers to upgrade their international competitiveness, promote the academic sector to be engaged in the automotive research and enable the upgrading of industrial talents in terms of quantity and quality for local automotive industry.

To increase the international popularity of Taiwanese automotive industry, improve the international cooperation opportunities and explore the international trading opportunities, the Department of Industrial Technology, Ministry of Economic Affairs (DOIT/MOEA) instructed TARC to organize the first Taiwan Automotive International Forum & Exhibition (TAIFE-2005) in Nov., 17th ~19th and got successful result. In the meantime, t-car, TARC R&D result, will be demonstrated in the forum site. Now, TARC is working on TAIFE 2007 with the theme of “The Evolution of Movability” and try to lead Taiwanese automotive industry to bring its advantages into full play and create new business opportunities for automotive industry so that Taiwan will move toward the R&D and part supply center of worldwide automaker.