Share

Mexico’s Growing Auto Industry: Bane Or Boon For U.S. Big Three?

By Nathaniel Parish Flannery

“Investors see Mexico as an export platform with access to the United States,” points out COA's Eric Farnsworth.

Standing in front of the assembly line in Volkswagen’s massive campus in Puebla, Mexico, 35-year-old line boss Milton Araujo, looked at the shiny new Volkswagen Beetles rolling off the conveyer belt, illuminated by the bright lights overhead. “Back in the day, everybody had a Beetle,” he told Fox News Latino. “Now the car is different, much more modern.”

So is Puebla, which has emerged as one of the main hubs of Mexico’s automotive sector. “There are more stores, shopping centers,” Araujo said.

VW’s facility is a modern metropolis unto itself, covering more than 1.1 square miles, employing nearly 16,000 people and producing more than 500,000 vehicles a year. 

It’s the largest car factory in North America and a big part of the reason why in 2013 the company celebrated the production of its ten millionth car made in Mexico....

In the last decade, Mexico has emerged as the world’s fourth-largest automobile exporter, behind only Germany, Japan and Korea, and earlier this year the country eclipsed Japan as the biggest exporter of cars to the world’s largest market, the United States.

“Investors see Mexico as an export platform with access to the United States,” Eric Farnsworth, the Vice President at the Council of the Americas in Washington D.C. told FNL....

Read the full article here.

Related

Explore