Volkswagen To Resume Car Manufacturing In Kenya 40 Years After

German Auto giants Volkswagen have announced that they will resume producing cars in Kenya by the end of the year after four decades of pause in production, as it looks to sell more vehicles across the East African region.

Volkswagen which assembled cars in Kenya in the 1960s and 1970s, will join other brands already being put together in the country, including Isuzu, Toyota. President Uhuru Kenyatta and Volkswagen South Africa’s chief executive, Thomas Schafer after a meeting on Wednesday said that VW will establish an assembly plant to initially produce its Vivo model. 

Volkswagen South Africa will now again establish an assembly plant to produce motor vehicles at the Kenya Motor Vehicle Manufacturers limited in Thika,” Kenyatta said.

Kenya mostly assembles trucks, pick-ups and buses from kits supplied by foreign manufacturers, although data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics showed that the number of vehicles assembled between January and April was down 31% year-on-year to 2,258 vehicles.

“We believe that Kenya has got the potential to develop a very big fully-fledged automotive industry. The East African Community has got the potential, and today is the first step in this direction that we want to take with our passenger cars,” Schafer said.