A new production plant for the wholly owned Daimler subsidiary, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles Pvt. Ltd. (DICV), has been completed in Oragadam-Chennai, India.
The plant, with a manufacturing site along with the integrated research and development center and the state-of-the-art test track, is one of only three Daimler truck plants worldwide to combine truck assembly and components production at one location.
The start of production of the BharatBenz heavy-duty trucks are scheduled for the third quarter of 2012.
“Our new Oragadam-Chennai plant shares Daimler’s stringent quality standards with its sister plants around the world and is unique at the same time,”said Dr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars. “It is the only Daimler plant in the world that houses products which combine Indian engineering with German and Japanese DNA under a single roof. This way, we are optimally positioning ourselves for one of the world’s strongest and fastest-growing truck markets.”
The facility in Oragadam-Chennai will produce the versatile BharatBenz product range for the Indian volume market. While some BharatBenz truck models are based on the Mercedes-Benz Axor platform, others are built on the Fuso Canter series. The plant in Chennai has an initial production capacity of 36,000 units per year and is designed to allow an increase up to more than 70,000 commercial vehicles per year.
Said Andreas Renschler, Daimler Board of Management member responsible for Daimler Trucks and Daimler Buses, “DICV is an outstanding example of Daimler Trucks’ Global Excellence strategy. Our worldwide production network and our global research and development efforts enable us to develop, manufacture, and sell trucks in India, for India. We do all of this in close proximity to our customers, for our customers.”
With a product portfolio of 17 BharatBenz commercial vehicles by 2014, DICV is preparing for the promising Indian truck market, which has developed into the world’s third-largest market with a volume of more than 330,000 vehicles in the weight classes of 5.5 to 54 tons in 2011.
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