Force Motors Has Now Built 2 Lakh Mercedes-Benz Engines in Pune; Most People Don’t Know About This

The 200,000th Mercedes-Benz engine came off the line at Force Motors’ Chakan plant in Pune on June 17, 2026. It was a six-cylinder M556 turbo petrol unit meant for the GLS 450, and it marked nearly three decades of a manufacturing partnership that sits almost entirely out of public view. When a buyer purchases a Mercedes-Benz C-Class, E-Class, GLC, GLE or GLS assembled in India, the engine under the bonnet came from a plant in Chakan that most people associate with the Traveller van (originally a Mercedes T1 or Bremen Transporter), not a luxury German automobile.

The partnership between Force Motors and Mercedes-Benz began in 1997. Force supplies localised engines and axles for all Mercedes-Benz vehicles that are assembled in India. That scope covers the complete range: both petrol and diesel variants, in four-cylinder and six-cylinder configurations. In FY 2024-25, Force Motors’ Chakan facility achieved its highest-ever annual engine dispatch to Mercedes-Benz India, setting a new record before the cumulative 2,00,000-unit milestone arrived this year.

The Chakan facility, spread across 1,30,000 square feet and commissioned in its current form in 2016, was built specifically to expand engine and axle manufacturing for Mercedes-Benz. It can produce and test up to 14 engine variants and has a nameplate capacity of 20,000 engines and 20,000 front and rear axles annually. The plant handles the assembly, testing, and dispatch of these powertrains to the Mercedes-Benz India assembly plant, from where the finished vehicles emerge.

Force Motors is also a BMW engine supplier. The same Chakan ecosystem covers BMW engine assembly covering models from the 3 Series to the 7 Series and X range. More recently, Force Motors entered a joint venture with Rolls-Royce Power Systems, extending its precision manufacturing footprint further. The company’s public identity as a commercial vehicle maker, anchored by the Traveller and Gurkha, sits alongside a component manufacturing business that supplies two of the three largest German luxury automakers.

Mercedes-Benz vehicles assembled in India qualify for lower customs duty compared to fully imported units because local assembly using locally sourced components brings the import fraction below a regulatory threshold. Engine localisation at a Chakan facility run by a domestic manufacturer contributes to that calculation.

It is one of the reasons a locally assembled Mercedes GLC can be priced meaningfully lower than a CBU equivalent would be, and why the price gap between assembling in India and importing fully built vehicles is significant enough to justify maintaining the assembly programme.

The 2,00,000-engine milestone is a big production number. It reflects the cumulative output of a supply relationship that has been running continuously for 29 years across model generations, platform changes, and emission regulation upgrades from BS4 through BS6 and beyond. That kind of longevity in a supplier relationship in the automotive sector is uncommon and reflects performance consistency on Force Motors’ part across a very long programme. Force Motors also crossed the 1 lakh engine production mark for BMW last year.