Fiat Chrysler to set up $150 million digital hub in Hyderabad

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), on December 16, announced a $150 million investment to set up a new global digital hub in Hyderabad.

This new innovation and technology development facility is the FCA’s largest digital hub outside of North America and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). The facility will create 1000 new jobs by the end of 2021 with further plans to increase hiring over the next two to three years.

The newly-recruited employees will work on products and concepts that will define FCA’s future mobility. With this new planned investment, the maker of Jeep SUVs will have the biggest pool of engineers for an auto company in India as two other centres in Chennai and Pune have been operational for some time.

The Chennai centre in fact has grown to be one of the largest technology centres outside of North America for FCA, housing about 1,000 engineers (at present, the total FCA India engineer headcount is about 1600). Every new vehicle project of FCA destined for the US, Europe or anywhere else in the globe is done from Chennai

“The global digital hub will focus on building strategic competencies in niche technology areas such as connected vehicle programs, artificial intelligence, data accelerators, and cloud technologies, among others”, said a statement from FCA.

Mamatha Chamarthi, CIO, FCA, North America and Asia Pacific said, “Our goal is to build an innovation powerhouse that will harnesses the intelligence enabled by data to build new products and services to deliver at the speed of our customers’ expectations,”

“One of the key objectives of FCA ICT India is to digitise every aspect of FCA’s automotive operations globally and within India, and to shift from legacy to digital through adoption of emerging technologies”, Chamarthi added.

From the Ranjangaon facility near Pune, FCA India manufactures the Jeep Compass and exports the SUV to 13 international right-hand drive markets, including Japan and Australia.

After the phase out of the Fiat brand from India at the start of the year FCA is focussing on the Jeep brand (which belongs to the Chrysler umbrella brands) for India growth. Ranjangaon plant has an annual manufacturing capacity of 1.6 lakh vehicles and 3.5 lakh powertrains.

Set up in 2007, the Chennai centre handles parts designing, testing and validation for all products developed, manufactured and sold in the US and European markets. The Pune centre, however, is in charge of products coming to India. The premium SUV Jeep Compass, for instance, was fine tuned for Indian tastes by the Pune centre.

FCA has three variants of the Compass and Wrangler in its India portfolio with prices starting at Rs 16.49 lakh. The company promises to add products to its line-up this year.