About a couple of months ago, French car manufacturer, PSA Peugeot Citroen had started with construction at their first Indian manufacturing plant. This plant is coming up at a place called Sanand. The town is situated 40 kms off Gujrat’s biggest city-Ahmedabad.
Last month, some senior Peugeot officials were present at the event to place the foundation stone of their car manufacturing plant. The ‘ground breaking’ ceremony was held in traditional Indian fashion and this certainly reflects the seriousness of the manufacturer for Indian market. Peugeot is said to have planned on investing as much as Rs 4,500 crores ($1 billion) in this project and the manufacturing plant is expected to be ready by 2014.
Mr Gregoire Olivier, Asia Operations, PSA Peugeot Citroen, said, “We will start with our 508 model and later add three more models in the first phase. One of them would be a C-segment car being designed specifically for India. We will also bring diesel hybrid car to India. However, we will not be able to tell when.“
Now, there are two things that we, at motoroids, are really happy about. First, India will soon see some modern Peugeot cars plying on our roads. And more importantly, this project is said to be providing jobs to as many as 5,000 individuals.
After the completion, this plant will have a manufacturing capacity of 170,000 cars and 100,000 petrol engines annually. Last but certainly far from being the least, we expect to see the entire line up of Peugeot cars at the Expo.