Part of a £1 billion remaking of the company’s UK manufacturing plant.
Image: Jaguar Land Rover
Jaguar Land Rover’s second all-electric car will be a new version of its XJ sedan, the company said on Friday. The plan to make an electric XJ was announced as part of a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) investment the company will make to retool its manufacturing plant in Castle Bromwich in the UK ahead of a greater push into electric vehicles.
The new electric XJ will be developed by the same team that created the I-Pace, Jaguar’s first EV, which was released in 2018. (The I-Pace is currently built by a contract manufacturer in Austria.) Jaguar Land Rover says it will make a “new range” of electrified vehicles at the revamped UK plant, and all models from 2020 onward will have electric or hybrid options. But the company didn’t offer any more information on what specific models it plans to release or a timeline for the electric XJ, and it confirmed it will keep making diesel vehicles.
The British automaker (which is owned by India’s Tata Motors) is framing the investment as a way to “safeguard thousands of jobs” in the UK. Jaguar Land Rover laid off 4,500 workers earlier this year, most of them in the UK, after cutting some 1,500 jobs last year. The automaker cited declining demand for diesel cars, a cooling of the Chinese auto market, and Brexit as reasons for the cuts.
Jaguar Land Rover said on Friday that it hopes its investment will inspire the build-up of an electric vehicle supply chain in the UK since the company has already committed to moving production of its battery packs and electric drive units there. The company specifically put out a call for a “giga-scale battery production plant” to be built in the UK. (Tesla is currently shopping around for a location for its fourth Gigafactory, though the automaker is likely to wind up building the plant in Germany.) “The UK has the raw materials, scientific research in our universities and an existing supplier base to put the UK at the leading edge of mobility and job creation,” Jaguar Land Rover CEO Ralf Speth said in a statement.
Turning around the UK’s auto industry could be tough since it has recently suffered serious post-Brexit vote blows. Honda and Ford have announced that they’re shuttering plants in the UK, and even British vacuum magnate James Dyson decided he will build his forthcoming electric car in Singapore.
The announcement on Friday was all about the future of Jaguar Land Rover, which isn’t surprising considering the tumultuous year the company had in 2018. Amid all of the swirling uncertainty with Brexit and the first drop in vehicle sales in China in decades, Jaguar Land Rover posted a loss in the hundreds of millions of dollars across 2018 — a loss that was made worse by some $3 billion in additional expenses related to the company’s restructuring efforts.
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