Daimler Dedicates Freightliner Plant in Mexico

SALTILLO, Mexico — Daimler Trucks dedicated its $300 million Freightliner plant here Feb. 27, as Mexican President Felipe Calderon joined company officials to formally launch the 1.3 million-square-foot facility.

The plant, which has begun producing Daimler subsidiary Freightliner’s Cascadia model, is capable of producing 30,000 trucks a year and comes on line as the company is shutting down its manufacturing facility at the Portland, Ore., headquarters of Daimler Trucks North America.

Andreas Renschler, head of Daimler Trucks globally, said the new plant “is the industry’s model for modern-day truck production worldwide and our new benchmark plant.”

Renschler, who runs the world’s largest commercial vehicle maker from Daimler AG headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, says others have questioned why DTNA would open a large new plant during the global economic slump that has sent truck sales plummeting.

The answer is that the plant, which took only 24 months from groundbreaking to the start of production, “is the right investment at the right time, in the right place with the right partners.” He said Saltillo would “not just export excellent trucks, but also the experience” the company has gained in designing and building it.

Renschler said the company had to be prepared for the rebound many economists predict will begin late in 2009 or early in 2010.

The plant, which is currently operating at what officials called “ramp-up mode” is making about eight trucks a day. The facility utilizes new production techniques that officials said would eventually be adopted at Daimler Truck plants around the world, such as lean manufacturing and solving defects at the production station where they occur, and not allowing the truck to continue down the line to be fixed later as is the usual practice in most factories.

Chris Patterson, president of DTNA and its Freightliner brand, said opening the plant here “makes good business sense” since more than 100 auto parts and processing plants have opened in Mexico in recent years.

The plant is located on a large arid tract of land surrounded by the Sierra Madre Mountains about 45 miles from Monterrey, a major manufacturing hub in northern Mexico.