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Exciting AutoDigital Premiere

 

27 October 2016

Exciting news from the automotive sector and high praise for the location Bremen and Jacobs University. For the first time, the Weser-Kurier has held the AutoDigital conference on the campus of our university. Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche took advantage of the occasion to announce good news for the Bremen Mercedes plant.
 
Daimler’s new electric car will be built in Bremen. The decision was announced by Daimler CEO Dr. Dieter Zetsche on Thursday morning at Jacobs University. “I am very pleased to confirm this officially here for the first time today: Yes, we will build the first production run of the EQ model here in Bremen,” said Zetsche before about 300 high-ranking conference participants from business, politics, and academics.
 
Previously, Professor Katja Windt, in her welcoming address, pointed out the great challenges faced by the automotive sector in the context of electro-mobility and digitalization. Meeting these challenges will require talented young “game changers” with outstanding training – exactly what they will get at Jacobs University. Bremen’s Mayor Carsten Sieling demonstrated his optimism that Bremen will master the challenges of the transformation in the automotive industry: “Borgward, Daimler – Bremen is an industrial location! We can leave the complaining to others,” said Sieling. “We want to help shape the epochal transformation in the automobile industry,” said he and praised Jacobs University in his remarks. It is “the only functioning private university in Germany.”
 
Daimler CEO Zetsche left no doubt of his confidence that the Bremen location will play an important role in the epochal change taking place in the automotive industry: “For Mercedes, Bremen is a real success story,” said Zetsche, who presented Daimler’s “CASE” model during the morning, which stands for Connectivity, Autonomy, Sharing, and Electrification. Four business areas that Daimler wants to combine, in order to play a leading role in all four.
 
Enak Ferlemann, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Transportation, will surely be pleased by such plans; at AutoDigital, he underscored how important it is to seize the opportunities of change in the automotive sector: “We have to be quick; the competition is not sleeping,” said Ferlemann. “Japan, Korea have already taken great strides in battery technology. The state must support the new direction being taken in the automobile industry.”
 
The organizer of the conference was the Weser-Kurier. The cooperating partners include Daimler as the main partner, Wirtschaftsförderung Bremen (Bremen’s economic development unit), the EU Fund for Regional Development, the industry network Automotive Nordwest, the business magazine Capital as media partner – and Jacobs University. 
 
For the keynote speech, Cornel Amariei, who completed his degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Jacobs University in 2015, returned to Bremen. During his course of study at Jacobs University, he developed glasses for the vision-impaired, which scan the environment and describe the surroundings to the wearer. Since then he has become Innovation Manager at Continental, and the prestigious US business magazine Forbes counts him among the 30 most influential people in Europe under 30. 
 
Additional information and impressions of AutoDigital can be found in the online dossier of the Weser-Kurier and on our Facebook pages.