The carmaker wants to change the way India thinks about car service, making owning a Skoda less of a responsibility and more of a pleasure.
For most car owners, taking their vehicle in for repairs is not something they look forward to. You send it out in the morning, make other arrangements for the day, and hope to have it ready by evening. Skoda India wants to change that and it’s starting in Chennai.
Brand power
Last year was a landmark year for Skoda in India. The company has almost doubled its sales, increased market share and expanded its operations to over 180 cities, covering approximately 85% of India. According to Skoda’s own calculations, this is Skoda’s best year in India in 25 years. Mr. Ashish Gupta, Brand Director, Skoda Auto India, said Tamil Nadu is an important part of the story, accounting for 9-10% of Skoda’s all-India sales, with 31 touchpoints already in place in the state and more on the way.
chennai first
Inaugurating the Skoda Express Care facility at Kun Motor Enterprises, Perungudi, OMR Road, he said it is befitting that Chennai becomes the home of Skoda’s first Express Care facility in India – a new express service model designed to reduce scheduled maintenance time to less than two hours from the usual three to four hours. KUN Motors’ plant in south Chennai was a natural choice, he said.
Mr. Arun Uppuswamy, MD, KUN Motors Pvt Ltd, said South Chennai is one of the fastest growing urban corridors in the country and has a technology-oriented, time-conscious, speed and convenience customer base. It makes more sense to launch express service at this location.
Speed design
Mr. Gupta said Skoda Express Care is more than just a fast track to regular service centres. It’s designed from the ground up for speed. It features a dedicated service infrastructure, advance job card preparation, parts pre-assembly, certified technicians working through a parallel workflow model, and real-time service tracking through WMS 2.0. Express Care is available on the current Skoda model range for qualifying scheduled maintenance visits and is designed to provide a streamlined and more efficient service experience while maintaining OEM quality standards.
The facility’s two-technician layout – with one technician working on both sides of the vehicle at the same time – can theoretically cut in half the time it would take a single technician to complete the same job. Special tools have been developed, a purpose-built technician cart reduces fatigue and increases efficiency, and an automatic refueling unit eliminates yet another time-consuming step in the repair process. Three dedicated bays within the 19-space facility are reserved exclusively for Express Care, handling the scheduled maintenance most commonly required by most vehicle owners (15,000, 30,000 and 45,000km services).
Redefining ownership
Beyond speed, the automaker has been working on a broader ownership experience for some time. All cars sold by the company in India come with Skoda Super Care, a package that includes a four-year warranty, four years of roadside assistance and four free services. The company claims that servicing a Kylaq is now cheaper than servicing a Maruti – a significant achievement that reflects the significant reduction in ownership costs over the past few years.
Parts supply has also been addressed head-on; he noted that Skoda currently maintains a service level of 96 per cent, meaning that 96 out of every 100 parts ordered by a dealer can be obtained at the dealership or at one of three warehouses in Bengaluru, Delhi or Pune.
what’s next
Skoda plans to launch Express Care in 12-15 plants across India by the end of this year and will later expand it across India. This model is expected to work best first in metropolitan areas – where customers are pressed for time and cannot even go half a day without a vehicle. The company is also looking at other cities with the greatest demand before expanding further. For towns and regions where full-service centers are not yet available, OEMs have deployed eight to nine mobile service vans to take mechanics to customers instead of the other way around. He clarified that the aim is to have every significant segment of Skoda owners in India within 50 to 100 kilometers.
plan ahead
Mr. Gupta mentioned that Skoda’s service network expansion was not passive, but the result of careful, data-driven planning that began years before individual parking spaces were built. Every three years, the company conducts what it calls an “ideal network planning” exercise to map customer density in a PIN code and identify where the next growth clusters are likely to emerge. RTO data analyzed by professional organizations will be incorporated into this plan, allowing the company to proactively understand the direction of car ownership development, not just the current situation. He highlighted that the decision to set up operations in Chennai’s OMR corridor, for example, was taken a decade ago, long before residential areas and technology parks turned it into one of the city’s busiest growth corridors.
Parts localization
Joining the conversation, Mr. JP Cheverry, Brand Director, After Sales and Vehicle Logistics 1, Skoda Auto Volkswagen India Ltd., said that one of the more important behind-the-scenes transformations of Skoda over the past few years has been the localization of components. With the support of Kushaq, Slavia and Kylaq, nearly 90% of components for India 2.0 and 2.5 plans are now sourced locally. This has a knock-on effect on service quality and costs. Sub-assemblies that once had to be imported from Europe are now available locally, and parts that previously required replacement of the entire assembly can now be repaired at the component level, saving time, lowering costs and reducing waste. He said the automaker is also “committed to retaining parts for 15 years after a model is discontinued, giving owners long-term peace of mind.”
go green
Mr Gupta said sustainability at Skoda is not a single initiative but a series of small, consistent actions that are integrated into every aspect of the ownership and service experience. The real leather in the vehicle has been replaced with vegan leather. Dealer lighting has completely switched to LED – a change made more than five years ago. Some dealers are now installing solar panels to reduce reliance on the grid.
The facility design incorporates large glass panels to maximize natural light in the workshop and reduce the need for artificial lighting in energy-intensive spaces. At the service level, car washing, which can consume 200 to 250 liters of water per vehicle, is increasingly being replaced by dry cleaning methods. Recycling of batteries, tires and engine oil is also being gradually introduced, mirroring already established practices across Skoda’s European operations. Crucially, no dealer is allowed to begin operations without a wastewater treatment plant – a non-negotiable baseline for the entire network.
Talent pipeline
Finding and retaining skilled technicians is one of the automotive service industry’s most persistent challenges. Skoda’s answer starts at the ITI level, through a program called the Volkswagen Group Technical Apprenticeship Program (VG TAP), which works with local ITIs to train students on Skoda and Volkswagen Group vehicles before they enter the workforce. Many trainees subsequently join Skoda dealers and are already familiar with the brand’s service procedures and standards. Beyond recruitment, training is seen as an ongoing journey – last year alone the company invested nearly 30,000 person-days in training across its network. Mr. Gupta explained that the process from basic to advanced technicians can take 10 to 12 years, and companies are increasingly supplementing classroom and workshop training with online coaching modules, a move that can achieve both efficiency and sustainability goals.
As the Skoda brand director says, “The motto is simple – you never drive alone.” Whether that means a two-hour service turnaround in Chennai or mobile vans popping up in smaller towns, the aim is the same, which is to make owning a Skoda less of a responsibility and more of a pleasure.