And while underlining his production facilities capabilities, Kern doesn't forget to mention his supply chain partners. "They play an important role in the production process and we have the best suppliers working with us.

Our partners worked in tandem with us and are integral part of our success story. Of course, we expect highest quality from our supply chain as our customers are used to the best product in the world. The ‘year of excellence' will entail excellence from our partners as well."

So, what is the percentage of local content in the cars built at Chakan? Does Kern see it growing? How much and in what time-frame? He takes it one question at a time. "We have varying levels of local value addition to our products manufactured in our plant. However, on an average 35 percent to 40 percent local value addition is done to our products manufactured here in Chakan. This number is an average for C, E, S, M-Class and GL-Class. We have localised cable harness for some of our products."

Kern says that it's a natural decision to increase local content in Mercedes' manufacturing going forward as the volumes increases and he does see it growing in foreseeable future. "Our effort has always been to localise based on commercial feasibilities and technological capabilities.

Considering low volume multi-product manufacturing set-up, we focus more on doing knock-down assembly thereby leveraging better container utilisation. We also try to get the best by more and more local value addition. As we go along and as product volumes increases, our efforts are always to source more locally. However, we cannot reveal the time line for that immediately."