Recently, Daimler Truck has announced the establishment of the Mercedes-Benz Trucks segment’s ISEAA (India, South-East Asia and Australia-Pacific) customer region. The development comes amid Daimler India Commercial Vehicles (DICV) committing an additional investment of Rs 4,000 crore with the TN govt last month, taking its cumulative investment in India to more than Rs 14,500 crore over the years. In an interview with Torsten Schmidt, CEO & MD of DICV, who will also function as the president of the Mercedes-Benz Trucks customer region ISEAA, spoke about developments at its Chennai facility in Oragadam and its expansion plans. Excerpts:How will the 4,000 crore investment in TN strengthen R&D, and will Chennai increasingly serve global requirements?We have an integrated facility in Chennai with an end-to-end whole value chain, from engineering, sourcing, manufacturing, sales and after-sales to exports. We are collecting customer requirements globally and bringing them into development. The investment will support future product creation and engineering, and enable work throughout our global engineering and R&D network. This is an important step to increase our future product portfolio. We are investing in our future product portfolio to meet customer demands. We will continuously develop products, and they will be available for exports in the future.The Chennai facility manufactures four global brands under one roof. What is your domestic and export mix, and what are the future opportunities?Since 2012, we have produced 2,30,000 trucks for the Indian market. We have exported 75,000 trucks to more than 70 countries. There is a good mix of domestic and export share. Going forward, we want to leverage our integrated setup in Oragadam to further grow domestically, but also grow for ISEAA in the future.What is the current manufacturing capacity of the Oragadam facility? And how do you plan to leverage it further in the coming years?We have one of the most modern facilities in Oragadam, where we focus on sustainability and efficiency. We have a capacity of 58,000 trucks and 2,000 buses a year. We also leverage the setup for India and globally as well. The investment is going into the value chain of engineering, R&D and manufacturing capabilities. The idea is to make products that are more advanced, manufacturing-ready so that we can produce them at the quality we need for the domestic and global markets. It’s not only about capacity or quantity, but quality of production and efficiency.Where does the Chennai plant stand in your global operations?It plays an important role. This is a central anchor for us and also for global exports into the Mercedes-Benz distribution network.Is DICV supporting other Daimler Truck entities?We are the only facility that produces all brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BharatBenz and Freightliner. So, four of the brands are being produced, while BharatBenz is exclusively for India. The other brands are for the world. It plays an important role beyond exports because we are also exporting parts. Together with our suppliers, we are qualifying suppliers to globally deliver into the Daimler Truck network. We have exported more than 330 million parts into the Daimler Truck global network. And we have exported more than 60,000 transmissions, which we are building in India exclusively for the European plants.Does DICV plan to introduce new products in the future?We have a constant feedback loop from our customers. We are constantly improving our product portfolio. Last year, we introduced the HX series for construction and also our new Torqshift series, the automated manual transmission (AMT) version for mining. Over the last few months, we have received encouraging feedback from drivers and fleet operators that this kind of driving is benefiting drivers, with less fatigue, more comfort and higher productivity. We are looking to expand the AMT range across the BharatBenz portfolio to bring this value to more customers across our product range. Today, AMT is part of construction and mining. We will expand it into different models and variants, and we will also look at the on-road transportation segment.(This correspondent was at IAA Transportation fair 2026 in Hannover, Germany, on the invitation of Daimler Truck)
