Daimler India Commercial Vehicles Private Limited, a subsidiary of Daimler AG, has opened a state-of-the-art test track facility at its proposed manufacturing plant site at Oragadam in Kancheepuram district.
The DICV had signed an MoU with the Tamil Nadu government three years ago to bring in a total investment of Rs.4,400 crore for setting up truck manufacturing facility at a 400-acre site at Oragadam. Hitherto, DIVC rolled out trucks from its Pune plant where the parts required for heavy vehicles were imported as completely knocked down (CKD) kits from Germany and assembled, according to Marc Llistosella, Chief Executive Officer, DIVC.
“Response from customers and on-road performance reports of our vehicles rolled out from Pune plant revealed that it will not be possible to continue with the operation of bringing a vehicle model from somewhere else to this country since the customer requirement and circumstances under which our vehicles had to be operated here defied our calculations”, Mr. Marc Llistosella said while addressing a press conference at Oragadam on Thursday.
Aydogan Cakmaz, vice-president, Product Engineering, DICV, said extensive customer correlation measurements to simulate the reality of Indian terrain were taken into account before formation of the test track facility.
