Top News

Skoda Auto Volkswagen India has expanded its engineering footprint in Pune with a new wing of its Technology Centre Pune in Baner. The new facility spans 33,000 sq ft and has been designed to accommodate more than 250 engineers. With this addition, the group’s total engineering workforce across its Pune R&D operations now goes past 450 people. The new Baner site will work alongside the existing Technology Centre at Chakan, which has been operational since 2019.

This expansion matters because product development capacity has now become one of the group’s main tools for growing faster in this market. Over the last few years, Skoda and Volkswagen have moved from adapting global products for local use to engineering more vehicles around local requirements from the start.

The most visible outcomes of that effort have been the Volkswagen Taigun, Virtus, Skoda Kushaq, Slavia and, more recently, the Skoda Kylaq, the group’s first sub-4-metre SUV developed for this market.

The new Baner centre has been set up in a part of Pune that gives the group access to a larger engineering talent pool without depending only on plant-based roles at Chakan.

The facility will focus on advanced vehicle development, platform engineering, software solutions and sustainable mobility technologies. That means its work will not be limited to styling changes or minor local adaptations. It will cover areas that influence how future cars are designed, tested, packaged and updated.

The existing Chakan-based Technology Centre has already played an important role in the INDIA 2.0 programme, which gave the group the MQB A0 IN platform and a new generation of locally built products.

Since 2019, this engineering base has supported models that now account for a substantial share of the company’s local manufacturing output. In 2025, locally built models including the Kylaq, Kushaq, Slavia, Taigun and Virtus crossed 5.5 lakh units combined.

The SAVWIPL has said the expanded Technology Centre will support faster adaptation to customer preferences and market trends. In simple terms, this means products can now be developed or modified more quickly around local expectations on cost, features, safety and packaging.

The group already has the manufacturing side to back this up. Its two plants at Chakan and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar together offer annual capacity of 3.15 lakh units. It has also crossed 20 lakh locally produced vehicles in this market as of 2025.

On exports, the group has shipped more than 7 lakh vehicles to over 40 countries. That scale matters because a larger R&D operation makes most sense when the company already has enough local manufacturing and export volume to spread development costs across many units.

The new centre also increases the group’s ability to work on software and connected technologies locally. That is important because future product cycles will involve more software-led changes than before, including updates for ADAS, connected features, digital interfaces and energy management in electrified vehicles. An engineering base that only understands mechanical localisation is no longer enough.

SAVWIPL has described the Pune setup as part of the Volkswagen Group’s global R&D ecosystem, with the local team acting as the “Voice of India”. This suggests the local unit is not just executing instructions from Europe. It is expected to shape product decisions for both this market and export programmes.

The VW-Skoda already have nearly 700 customer touchpoints and more than 4,000 employees. It oversees the operations of six Volkswagen Group brands here: Skoda, Volkswagen, Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini and Porsche. For mass-market growth, however, the real focus remains on Skoda and Volkswagen. The Kylaq has opened up the sub-4-metre SUV space for the group, and that alone creates room for future spin-offs, platform derivatives and updated body styles.