At Mercedes-Benz Türk, we attach great importance to innovation and R&D activities. In order to further strengthen our efforts in this area, we transformed the StartUP competition we launched in 2017 into a more focused and long-term investment program supported by a fund called "Mercedes-Benz Türk Ventures" in 2022. Mercedes-Benz Türk Ventures aims to support innovative initiatives in the field of mobility and to turn these Turkish startups into international successes.
With the "Mercedes-Benz Türk Ventures x Fark Labs Acceleration and Investment Program", we aim to support startups from Türkiye and help them grow on a global scale.
In the first 6 months of 2022, Mercedes-Benz Türk Truck and Bus R&D teams demonstrated a great innovation success by filing a total of 112 patent applications. This brings our total number of patent applications to 621 since 2014.
We obtained the R&D Center Certificate at our Hoşdere Bus Plant in 2009 and started our R&D activities for the bus and truck product groups. We accelerated our work in the truck product group with our R&D Center established in Aksaray in 2018.
We continue to shape the future of the automotive industry with the projects developed by our engineers in our R&D centers in Istanbul and Aksaray. We are leading the way with OMIplus ONdrive web-based projects, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality technologies.