Iaşi, 16th of April 2011 – Continental Automotive Iaşi, subsidiary of the Continental Corporation, one of the most important suppliers in the automotive industry, opened its gates to visitors on the 16th of April, between 10.00 - 19.00. The event, reaching its 5-a ediţie, is focused on students, through the Student Competition, but it is also focused on professionals in the software, hardware and mechanics fields, who wish to know the challenges and novelties offered by the global automotive industry.

Persons that participated in the Open Day had the opportunity to visit 4 test-benches where activities, projects and workflow of Continental Automotive Romania were presented, as well as an exposition of products and projects under development in Iaşi, and they had the opportunity to see hybrid test cars from Toyota.

In December 2010, Continental Automotive Iaşi proposed to students of technical faculties in Iaşi, Suceava, Galaţi and Chişinău two thinking topics:
· programing an electric racing car that would stop at a certain spot
· developing a control unit for operating headlamps.
Thus, 22 teams were registered:
· 13 from the Gh. Asachi Technical University of Iaşi,
· 3 teams from the Stefan cel Mare Technical University of Suceava,
· 3 teams from the Dunarea de Jos University of Galaţi and
· 3 teams from the Technical University of Moldova from Chişinău.

The winning team for the project of developing a control unit for operating headlamps was team number 6 - from the University of Galați, consisting of Caracaţeanu Cătălin Paul and Chiru Cezar). Upon finding out the results, students stated that ''the project was a challenge, but the effort was properly rewarded and we are very happy”.

The team that managed to program an electric racing car to stop at a certain spot was one of the teams from Suceava (Amariei Gheorghe, Bodorovici Laurentiu and Bîrsan Valentin). ''''The fact that the team has 2 students who are barely in the first year of studies made the project a great accumulation of information in a very short time. We are very proud because we managed to work as a team and to win in the end against much more experienced teams'' stated Amariei at the award ceremony.

Winning teams received the amount of 900 euro and one day within Continental in order to find out more about the work environment and in order to meet managers and to get an idea about how it is like to work within Continental.