The story of Bosch: Part two

Right from the get-go, two things set Bosch apart from its many competitors – innovation and quality. Now, these are so boringly corporate that I can hear you yawn from here. Every company in the world claims that they are innovative and high-quality. Except Ryanair, possibly. Michael O’Leary would probably claim that they are innovative and f@%king cheap.

The innovation bit is indisputable, and truly impressive. If you’ve ground your way through our ‘Breakthroughs’ series, you’ll have noticed that we could almost have entitled it ’stuff Bobby invented’, so often does the company name crop up. In Part one, we ticked off a few of the biggies – the high-tension magneto, the first practical Diesel and advanced mechanical petrol fuel injection. We could have mentioned the first electronic fuel injection system (Jetronic, 1967), ABS (1978), traction control (1986), the CAN bus (also 1986), ESP (1995) or common-rail Diesel injection systems – the list really does go on and on…

Now, before the historians fire up their flame-throwers for me, I know that Bosch may not have ‘invented ‘ all of these – i.e. filed the first patents – but they were the first to apply them in mass production.