Daimler India Commercial Vehicles inaugurated its new state of the art manufacturing facility in the Indian market. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Selvi J Jayalalithaa inaugurated the state-of-the-art 400-acre plant which was built in a record time of 24 months.
The plant is one of only three Daimler truck plants worldwide to combine truck assembly and components production at one location.
The total investment of DICV is Rs 4,400 crore, including the manufacturing facility for BharatBenz brand trucks as well as research and development. The start of production of the BharatBenz heavy-duty trucks are scheduled for the 3rd quarter of 2012.
The Oragadam plant 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.
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 to 49 tonnes in 2011.
