Volkswagen and Skoda vehicles will soon be rolling off a GAZ assembly line in the industrial Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod thanks to a joint-venture agreement and a 200 million euro investment.
VW, which owns and develops Skoda products, said that the deal will initially see about 110,000 vehicles produced annually until2019. At that time, VW and GAZ will be able to re-evaluate their agreement.
The German automaker says that GAZ will be tasked with building two sedans – the Volkswagen Jetta and Skoda Octavia – and one utility/family-oriented vehicle – the Skoda Yeti – in Nizhny Novgorod primarily for the Russian market. Production is set to commence in late 2012, once VW has trained GAZ workers to meet its quality standards and once the plant’s facilities are expanded to accommodate the increased volume.
Nizhny Novgorod, known during the Soviet Union days as Gorky (after Maxim Gorky, the socialist writer), is Russia’s automotive assembly and engineering center. Its GAZ plant – translated as Gorky Automobile Plant – was opened in 1929 as a collaboration between Ford Motor Company and the Soviet Union. The historic facility built Chevrolet-developed trucks as part of a Lend-Lease agreement after World War II and it built the Volga Siber, a four-door sedan created using tooling from the early-2000s Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Stratus, until the end of last year.
