Ford Motor Company will invest $72 million to expand its engine facility in Chennai to further support its sales and export growth plans in India.
When the expansion programme is completed in mid-2012, the engine plant's production capacity will increase from 250,000 to 330,000 units a year—an additional output of 80,000 diesel engines annually, the company announced today.
With this, Ford's investments in India will exceed the $1-billion-mark, a press release said.
Ford's engine plant was inaugurated in February 2010, a few months ahead of the company's first small car in India, the Figo.
The new investment also “supports our plan to introduce eight new global Ford vehicles in India by 2015,” says Mr Micheal Boneham, Managing Director, Ford India Pvt Ltd, in the release. “When the expansion is finished, a third production shift will be added at the engine assembly plant, creating more than 300 new direct jobs.”
Mr Boneham had earlier said that Ford wanted Chennai to be the company's ‘global low displacement engines hub'.
The plant is the first Ford facility to feature single flexible production line manufacturing petrol and diesel engines. It is also the first Ford plant to run a flexible crank shaft production line producing crank shafts for petrol and diesel engines.
Today, the plant produces five Duratec petrol engine variants and one Duratorq diesel engine variant for Ford vehicles. It is also gearing up to produce powertrains for Ford's all-new global Fiesta sedan, when it is launched in India later this year.
In March, Ford rolled out its 100,000{+t}{+h} engine produced at the plant—14 months after the first engine was produced there.
Since June 2010, more than 4,000 India-built 1.4L and 1.6L petrol engines have been exported to Thailand every month. Diesel engines have also been exported to South Africa since 2008 and Ford plans to export India-built petrol and diesel powertrains to more markets in the near future.