"We want to give our Indian customers a truly global product with unmatched features that will definitely appeal to their aspirational tastes. While the product itself has many industry-first features in the Indian SUV segment, we have also used many new and advanced manufacturing technologies at our Ranjangaon facility to produce this vehicle," he adds.

A global product
Jeep Compass, which was first unveiled to select journalists at a technical immersion session at the Ranjangaon facility in April early this year, is the first Jeep product to be manufactured in India. While FCA launched the Jeep brand in the Indian market for the first time in August 2016 with its Completely Built Units (CBU), it is counting big on the Jeep Compass to establish the brand presence in this market.

James Lyijynen - Chief Program Engineer Jeep Compass FCA Global, who was also present to witness the unveiling of the SUV at the Ranjangaon plant, says that the Compass is being built in four plants globally. "The Ranjangaon plant in Pune, India is the fourth plant. We launched the Compass in the plant in Brazil followed by China, Mexico and now in India.

"The other three plants are left hand drive markets. India is a growing right hand drive market, it gave us the opportunity to do two things --- to develop the right hand drive product for India and to centralise our product for right hand drive markets in one plant. And we have done that," he says, with a certain pride.

"All our four plants talk to each other in terms of exchanging relevant information. So one of the benefits that the India plant has that it has all the lessons learnt from the three previous plants," he adds.

Speaking about the plant's readiness to roll out a truly global product, Gurpratap Boparai, CEO Fiat India, says that the plant has worked very hard to get to the global standards. "And we are absolutely now at global standards. The quality of our current products has improved dramatically even though we don't do much volume but all the inputs from the first line quality are absolutely at global levels.

"We are one of the lowest cost warranty sites in the world for FCA. We are ready and that's why the top management has entrusted us with the responsibility of making cars not just for any right hand market but even for places like UK, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. These are absolutely developed markets which get products from everybody. And this is not a low cost product," he states.

Read the complete interview at http://www.themachinist.in/latest_issue/worldwidemedia/2017-Jun/June-2017