With former cricketer Sachin Tendulkar making a few turns of the spanner on a BMW 5-series car, BMW India announced an aggressive production and launch schedule for 2015. The company announced that they will launch 15 new cars in 2015. With the i8 hybrid supercar already launched the company has 14 cars remaining to be launched this year including refreshed variants of the 1-series, 3-series, X1 among them.
BMW India also announced that local assembly operations at Chennai had increased to a capacity of 14,000 cars annually in Chennai. Robert Frittrang, Managing Director, BMW Plant India said that over 95 per cent of the cars sold by BMW in India are assembled at Chennai.
In fact the BMW facility in Chennai is now getting 50 per cent of their parts from local Indian companies, although most of them are importing components and making the sub-assemblies to be put together at BMW's plant. For example Force Motors is assembling the engines. BMW India President, Philipp Von Sahr said that in terms of value, 50 per cent of the car was now being assembled by India-based companies although clarified later that this did not mean manufacturing and BMW India's sales volume did not warrant the need for local manufacturing yet.
BMW India announced a hike in the investment they have made in India to Rs490 crore, a hike of Rs100 crore. However that is less than a controversial customs claim made on the company of Rs600 crore. Von Sahr said that the case is under litigation and that commenting on it right now would be incorrect.
Von Sahr also did not find fault in the recent National Green Tribunal order banning 10 year old diesel cars in the NCR "the air quality in Delhi is so poor that something radical needed to be done. Expatriates are refusing to come to Delhi particularly those with young children. Yes as car makers we will need to find solutions for car owners of these older cars, but Delhi needs to solve it's air pollution urgently."