Daimler India Commercial Vehicles (DICV) has announced that the brand has rolled out the 1000th BharatBenz Heavy-Duty Truck one of the 1500 BS6 compliant vehicles that it has produced in the last few months despite the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown. BharatBenz has also announced that the brand has restarted production on its volume driver model the BharatBenz 4228R.
The 1000th BharatBenz model that was produced was the brand’s 3523R model destined for one of the 235+ touchpoints in the BharatBenz India network that is being currently expanded further. While many manufacturers faced disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic DICV has remained on course and its success comes partly due to the 80%+ localisation rate for BSVI components.
In the recent past, DICV announced the achievement of a milestone of 100,000 BharatBenz medium and heavy trucks sold in India in its 8 years of production. Additionally, the brand has also marked sales of 4,500 BharatBenz buses in India since the start of production in 2015.
The brand has also marked a few export milestones with 130 Million parts in global exports within the production network of Daimler Trucks since the year 2014 and over 30,000 vehicles exported under the BharatBenz, Mercedes-Benz, Freightliner and FUSO brands to 50 international markets, since 2012.
The new BharatBenz trucks and Buses are powered by the OM926 series and 4D34i series engine which use an SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction) exhaust gas after-treatment system to achieve BS6 conformity with minimum changes to the engine. According to BharatBenz, the new BS6 engine also boasts a 20% longer service interval and 6% reduced maintenance requirement and comes with a 6 years standard warranty with a 2-year extended warranty.
Daimler India Commercial Vehicles have invested INR 500 crore to develop nearly 1000 new parts for the BS6 compliance out of which 80% have been localised.