Auto India, Car India

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Ford Motor Company is going to invest USD 72 million to expand its power train facility in its plant at Chennai. This decision has been taken to give an additional support and increase to its sales, and also to export growth plans in the Indian market. But the surprising fact in here is that the chunk of this investment will be beneficial only for the production of diesel motors. This will also give an opportunity to increase the number of employees, and the company is planning to add another 300 skilled job profiles at the plant. The decision of expansion of its diesel engine production capacity is going to bring a huge amount of foreign currency. Ford’s total investment in India with this investment is now going to be more than US$ 1 billion. Due to this entire expansion, Ford will export its 1.6 TiVCT, 1.4 HC and Duratorq diesel engines from the country.

When the expansion programme will be complete somewhere in the year 2012, the engine plant’s production capacity will increase from a around 250,000 to a whopping 330,000 units per year, which is an additional output of 80,000 diesel engines annually, according to the estimated reports.

President and Managing Director of Ford India, Michael Boneham, said “This investment reinforces the importance of our Chennai plant and Ford’s continued expansion in India,” He also added, “This expansion will allow us to provide more technologically advanced and fuel-efficient engines to our customers in India, and in markets around the world where we export Chennai-built vehicles.”

“The new investment also further supports our plan to introduce eight new global Ford vehicles in India by 2015,” Boneham added. “When the expansion is finished, a third production shift will be added at the engine assembly plant, creating more than 300 new direct jobs.”

The production plant is the first Ford facility to have featured single flexible production line, which currently is manufacturing both petrol as well as diesel engines. It is said to be the first Ford plant to run a flexible crank shaft production line. This production line is known to produce the crank shafts for petrol and diesel engines of all the Ford vehicles.

As of now, the plant manufactures five Duratec petrol engine variants and one Duratorq diesel engine variant for Ford vehicles. The company is slowly gearing up to produce power trains for the all-new global Fiesta sedan from Ford, when it will be launched in India later this year.

Since June 2010, more than 4,000 1.4L and 1.6L petrol engines that have been built in India have been exported to Thailand every month. Diesel motors built in India have also been exported to South Africa long back since 2008 and Ford also has plans to export those petrol and diesel powertrains which are developed in India to more markets in the near future.