Skoda Auto Volkswagen India gives ARAI land for Chakan crash test site

A crash lab rises next to the car plant

Skoda Auto Volkswagen India has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Automotive Research Association of India to hand over a parcel of land next to its Chakan plant near Pune for a new crash test facility. The MoU was exchanged on 30 October 2026 in the presence of the Union Minister of Heavy Industries and Steel, according to Autocar Professional.

Piyush Arora, MD and CEO of Skoda Auto Volkswagen India, said the company adjusted its own future expansion layout at Chakan to free up the land once ARAI asked for a site next to the plant. Reji Mathai, Director of ARAI, said the facility answers a need for stronger crashworthiness evaluation and compliance capability as vehicle technology changes fast.

No acreage, cost or commissioning date has been made public yet.

What ARAI will test there

The new site is meant to test both battery electric vehicles and combustion engined cars, Motorbeam reported. Two jobs are named for it. One is Bharat NCAP assessment, the crash test and star rating programme that Indian buyers increasingly check before a purchase. The other is export homologation, the certification work a car needs before it can be sold abroad.

Today, some of that certification work for India made cars still has to be done or duplicated at test centres overseas. A facility inside Chakan, next to the line that builds the Skoda Kushaq and Slavia and the Volkswagen Taigun and Virtus, would let the group validate new vehicles closer to where they are engineered and built, including electric models still in development for India.

Why it lines up with a bigger EV plan

The land deal comes five weeks after JSW Group and Volkswagen Group signed a non binding MoU on 9 September 2026 for a joint venture to run Volkswagen's passenger vehicle business in India, with JSW holding 51 percent and Volkswagen 49 percent, DriveSpark reported. That venture is meant to use the existing Chakan and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar plants, which have a combined capacity of about 400,000 vehicles a year, and is pointed at mass market combustion, hybrid and electric cars, with India positioned as a possible EV export hub. The investment commitment cited for the venture is above 1 billion euros, roughly ₹10,000 crore. A binding agreement is targeted by December 2026.

Read together, a carmaker clearing land for its own regulator's crash lab at the same site where a new EV focused joint venture is meant to build cars points at where Skoda and Volkswagen expect their next India made electric models to come from, and how fast they want to get them certified.

What it means for buyers

None of this changes a showroom price today. But a crash test facility that cuts the need to ship test cars abroad should shorten the gap between an EV being revealed and reaching Indian dealers, and it adds domestic capacity for the Bharat NCAP ratings that buyers now factor into a purchase. If the JSW joint venture closes on schedule, it also signals that Chakan and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, not a new greenfield site, will carry Skoda and Volkswagen's India EV volumes for the next phase.

Sources

• Skoda VW India & ARAI Sign MoU for Chakan Crash Test Facility
• Skoda Volkswagen India Partners With ARAI For New Crash Test Facility In Pune
• Škoda Auto Volkswagen India cedes land for crash test site
• JSW-Skoda Volkswagen India Sign Joint Venture MoU