Volkswagen today rolled out the 100,000th car from its Chakan plant in Pune. Production started in May 2009 with the Skoda Fabia followed by the Polo, Vento and the Fabia facelift. Next year a car smaller than Polo alongside the Skoda Rapid are likely to be made in Chakan.
Skoda and VW brand models are manufactured at Chakan. Assembly of Jetta, Laura, Passat, Superb and Yeti take place at another VW Group plant in Aurangabad.
The Chakan plant can manufacture 130,000 cars in a year at full capacity and it was constructed in just 17 months (private residences have taken longer to come up) with an investment commitment of 3,800 crore rupees. The investment is the largest to date by a German company in India.
IAB visited the squeaky-clean VW plant in August 2010 and met with German officials who said a small R&D team was working on improving every aspect of the Indian Polo.
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IAB is going to spend the day in VW’s Chakan plant in Pune. Posting frequency will be less, but we’ll come back tonight and posting will be back to full-throttle!
As we reported earlier Porsche would be launching the 2011 Cayenne in India at the end of this month. Prices are expected to start at approx 65 lakhs and go all the way up to 1.2 crores.
Reports suggest that the company is now planning to locally assemble the car at Volkswagen’s Chakan plant. Sources indicate that the company is contemplating on taking the CKD route for its SUV which is currently imported as a CBU from Porsche’s plant in Germany & thus attracts high import duties.
This would bring down the cost of the Cayenne drastically as the import duty would go down from the current 113% to 40%.
Ashish Chordia, CEO of Porsche India -
Porsche stands for ‘Made in Germany’ quality, and currently there are no plans of either assembling or manufacturing Porsches in India
The Porsche Cayenne accounts for 65% of the total sales of the company & is thus a significant model. Archrival Land Rover is contemplating on locally assembling their SUV’s. Porsche could very well take advantage of their parents’ plant in Chakan for assembling the Cayenne in order to give it a competitive price tag. If this happens, it would India would be the 1st place outside Germany to assemble Porsches.
The chiseled Volkswagen Polo with its Scirocco inspired styling will debut at the Delhi Auto Expo next year in both petrol and diesel options. The company’s new facility in Pune will manufacture the hatchback and follow it up with a sedan and possibly a MPV and station wagon in the future.
The India-spec Polo in addition to the manual transmission, will be supplemented with an automatic transmission. Production of the Polo is set to begin early next year.
The sedan variant of the Polo, as we reported earlier, will be longer and wider to offer more legroom and comfort to rear passengers. This particular variant could compete with the likes of the Dzire, Indigo and Fiesta when it comes out next year.
Right from the beginning, VW is targeting a localization level of fifty percent for the hatchback. The Chakan plant in Pune, in full flow, will have an annual capacity of 1.1 lakh cars which it says will take 4 to 6 years to reach.
The company is eyeing a 8-10 percent market share by this period. After the Polo, the company is also planning on introducing a whole crate of other VW models from hatchbacks to imports.
Note – we had earlier carried a VW Polo spy video here
Someone who knows his VWs captured this Polo while it was testing in an unknown location. The newest iteration of the immensely famous Polo is going to be manufactured right here in India in its newly constructed facility in Pune. The Skoda Fabia is presently manufactured there and later on, several VW cars including the Up! and the Polo sedan will roll out from there.
The VW Polo will be officially launched in India at the upcoming Auto Expo (2010).
A renewed VW Polo hatchback and a sedan based on the Polo will roll out of VW’s Chakan Plant in Pune in 2010. VW’s Chakan plant will start functioning in April, producing sister compan Skoda’s Fabia, a year before original intentions. The underlying structures of the Skoda Fabia will be used to make the Polo and Polo sedan.
Volkswagen today rolled out the 100,000th car from its Chakan plant in Pune. Production started in May 2009 with the Skoda Fabia followed by the Polo, Vento and the Fabia facelift. Next year a car smaller than Polo alongside the Skoda Rapid are likely to be made in Chakan.
