Last week, Volkswagen announced that it planned to start building the Polo Vivo in Kenya towards the end of 2016. The news left us wondering about the ramifications for local production of South Africa’s best-selling passenger car.
We reached out to Matt Gennrich, general manager for communications at Volkswagen Group South Africa, to find out.
“[The Kenyan agreement] is clearly good for the local operation in South Africa as it helps to increase our production volume on Vivo,” he told us.
How? Well, Gennrich revealed that the Thika plant would initially be importing Polo Vivo kits from the Uitenhage factory on either a semi-knocked down or completely knocked down basis.
“We plan to have a flexible plant and will then evaluate the possibility of doing the same with Passat and Tiguan,” he said.
We also asked Gennrich for his thoughts on reports that the Kenyan agreement could end up extending SA production of the Vivo.
“This is speculative. As we change models in South Africa, so would we change our models for Kenya,” he explained.
Gennrich went on to detail Volkswagen’s plans to establish a local training centre in Kenya to qualify production workers on the Vivo line as well as later “offer general vocational training”.
“We are working with the German government on this and hope that this will benefit unemployed Kenyans going forward,” he said.