This order was believed to receive multiple bids from many companies; two American bidders that stood out were the Union Rail Car Partnership (URC) and the United States Taiwan Transit Group.

The latter, a consortium between General Electric, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, General Railway Signal, Pullman and Westinghouse Air Brake Company formed solely to bid for this project, was seeking to supply both the rolling stock and signalling systems to Taipei and proposed to build the trains at Pullman's plant in Barre, Vermont.

Bombardier Transportation, which owned the Pullman factory, had to be the sole representative of the United States Taiwan Transit Group if it was to bid for the rolling stock.

[4] In the order of the first 132 cars, Kawasaki built the carbody shells in its main rolling stock plant at Hyōgo, Japan and subsequently shipped them to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Reasons cited by Taipei's Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) for this decision was concern that URC might be just a front for a Japanese company.

The C301 is built with stainless steel carbody and is hence unpainted save for a blue stripe running across the train exterior and the DORTS logo.

The undercarriage of the C301 features bolsterless bogies and a variable-frequency traction control with AC motors; the latter was originally from Westinghouse Electric Corporation using GTO thyristor technology.

When new 3-car formation C371 cars were introduced, train set 013/014 was subsequently re-joined and put back into normal service on Tamsui–Xinyi line from 22 July 2006 onward.