Mahindra to expand engine capacity in Ford plant

NEW DELHI: Mahindra & Mahindra will leverage Ford India’s manufacturing unit in Chennai to expand engine capacity for its vehicles, strengthening its alliance further with the American carmaker, M&M managing director Pawan Goenka said on Thursday.

“So, the next expansion will happen in the Ford plant and by doing so we will be saving about Rs 400 crore,” he told ET.

M&M and Ford are also working on utilising each other’s vehicle architectures to spawn out multiple sports utility vehicles in the future. The duo is developing a compact SUV codename W601, based on a Mahindra platform. A B-segment SUV on the Ford platform is also under discussion, Goenka said.

Mahindra plans to roll out three all-new utility vehicles in the next 18 months. While the C-SUV is slated for launch in the coming fiscal year, it will be followed by Z101, a new-gen Scorpio in calendar 2021. First of the block will be an all-new Thar that will hit the roads within three months.

Goenka said the companies will see cumulative savings of Rs 1,400 crore due from joint development of products and utilisation of Ford’s engine capacity in Chennai. “With the Ford partnership, we will be getting the benefit of Ford technology and also the benefit of reducing development cost,” he said. “And, we think, on the C-SUV…we will be saving about Rs 1,000 crore between the two (M&M and Ford) of us.”

Mahindra has lost its dominance in the country’s intensely competitive utility vehicle segment to the country’s top carmaker Maruti Suzuki. Mahindra sold 146,164 utility vehicles in the nine months till December 2019, while Maruti Suzuki sold 184,330 units in the category.