Buenos Aires — Volkswagen Group Argentina announced Thursday a $50 million investment to begin manufacturing trucks and buses in the province of Córdoba in Argentina, with production to begin in 2024, according to the company’s CEO, Marcellus Puig.
The German-owned company will aim to produce 3,000 trucks and buses per year, with four truck models and one bus model, and part of the production will be exported to countries in the region and the rest of the world.
With a total of $3.7 billion in vehicles exported in the first half of 2022, mainly to Brazil, vehicles are Argentina’s fourth-largest export product.
“We are proud to be able to continue announcing new investments to carry out new innovative projects of the VW Group in Argentina, as is the case of Ducati with the recent start of production of the Scrambler in the country, and now this ambitious project of trucks and buses,” said Puig.
The group plans to produce 1,000 Ducati units per year in Córdoba from 2023, according to the Córdoba provincial government.
“This is a central axis of the project of the country we have to build, which involves replacing imports with competitive national production, but also boosting the productive capacity to export in the region and the world,” Economy Minister Sergio Massa, who participated in the announcement, said.
Through this Volkswagen investment, two versions of the VW Delivery trucks, two versions of the VW Constellation and the Volksbus buses currently imported from Brazil will instead be produced at the Córdoba Industrial Center from 2024.
Vehicle production in Argentina in 2022
According to data from the Argentine Association of Automotive Manufacturers (ADEFA), vehicle production grew by 26.6% between January and November 2022 compared to the same period of 2021.
At the same time, the chamber announced exports during the same period increased by 25%.
Volkswagen, for its part, plans to increase production at its Pacheco plant, in Buenos Aires province, by between 20 to 30% in 2023, Martín Massimino, commercial director of Volkswagen in Argentina, told the portal Autoweb.
The company already manufactures the Amarok and Taos models at that plant.