The pick-up from Mercedes will be based on the Nissan NP300 and will be produced in Barcelona

Daimler and the Renault-Nissan alliance have officially announced this afternoon that the pick-up that Mercedes-Benz will launch in 2020 will share its platform with the one-tonne vans that the French and Japanese brands will market soon. All three will be built on the same platform that will give rise to the Nissan NP300, the successor to the Navara.

One of the plants where this trio will be manufactured is the Nissan factory in the Zona Franca of Barcelona, where the Navara has been assembled since its first generation. From the end of this decade, these facilities will assemble 120,000 units per year intended for multiple markets, excluding Latin America, a region that will be covered by the Renault factory in Córdoba, Argentina.

Each member of this group of pick-ups will have its own design and features, although the Nissan and Renault models will share more similarities with each other than with the Mercedes-Benz, whose engineers will be in charge of adapting it to the needs of its customers, according to Daimler in the press release.

The French model will be the first to start production at a third site: from 2016 it will roll off the assembly lines of the Nissan factory in Cuernavaca, Mexico. This pick-up will constitute the second recent venture of Renault in this vehicle category. Before the end of 2015, it will also have a pick-up of half a tonne, but its marketing plans have not yet been detailed.

The new models will be aimed mainly at Latin America, Australia, Europe and South Africa.Daimler and Renault-Nissan are embarking on a new joint project that will allow Mercedes-Benz and Renault to exploit a new segment -although the German brand already experimented with it in the past– through investments made under more favourable economic conditions, as they will make better use of economies of scale.

To varying degrees depending on the manufacturer, this set of models will give their respective brands access to a highly popular segment where they still have considerable room to grow market share. As Daimler already indicated a few weeks ago, the main regions these pick-ups are aimed at, apart from Latin America, are Australia, Europe and South Africa. North America remains off the list for now, but Daimler’s executives have not definitively ruled it out.

The chairman and chief executive of Renault-Nissan, Carlos Ghosn, has pointed out that the initiative will help to optimise production capacity at the Barcelona factory. Neither party has yet specified when the official presentation of these models will take place.

Sources | Daimler and Renault-Nissan