Mercedes Benz is gearing up to explore every nook and corner of commercial vehicle market in India. It is looking at the Indian market with a long term perspective and intends to cash upon emerging opportunities in India and marks its presence in light, medium and heavy commercial vehicle segment by 2012.

Mercedes-Benz will aggressively grow the commercial business segment with more variants of trucks and buses over the next five years. “Next year itself, we are looking at several new products including long-haul trucks and city buses as well as triple-axle, inter-city coaches. Once the Chennai truck plant goes on-stream in 2012, we will have both capacity and capability to take on the volume market with products that are more competitively priced due to higher degree of localization," said Mercedes-Benz India managing director Wilfried Aulbur.

Long haulage trucks, over-dimensional cargo vehicles with carrying capacity of more than 240 tones are some of the new products that it intends to bring to the Indian market. Mercedes is targeting niche segment. It hopes to get substantial orders from niche segments like mining and irrigation sectors.

Mercedes is also building up a manufacturing unit near Chennai as a part of its Rs 4500 crore investment plan. It intends to produce commercial vehicles for Indian volume market and exports. It is quite likely that these commercial vehicles will be rolled out from this Chennai unit.