Jaguar Land Rover has said it will invest £15 billion over the next 5 years in order in to upgrade its UK factories to produce electric vehicles.
The company’s Halewood plant in the North-West of England will shift to EV production, while its Wolverhampton plant will move away from producing internal combustion engines and switch over to electric motors and associated parts. JLR employs around 36,000 people across its UK locations.
The company said the £15bn would be spread over its “industrial footprint, vehicle programmes, autonomous, AI and digital technologies and people skills” – although they weren’t specific about how the money would be allocated.
Although owned by the Indian conglomerate Tata, Jaguar Land Rover is the last remaining mass-market car maker that’s headquartered in Britain. The only company that produces more cars on British soil is the Japanese Nissan. The news of the investment was welcomed by the UK car industry.
New all-electric car on the horizon
JLR also announced on Wednesday that its first UK-made electric car would be a £100,000 Jaguar four-door called the “Grand Tourer”. The new model will be built in Solihull with the first deliveries expected in 2025. Design chief Gerry McGovern said the Jaguar brand had been “radically reimagined” and would be built from a separate blueprint to the other models.
David Bailey, a professor of business economics at the University of Birmingham, said an investment of this scale will be welcome news for the British car industry.
“They’re finally really speeding up the electrification, both on the Jaguar but also on the other brands” including the lucrative Range Rover, a “big earner” for the company, he said. Bailey added that the separate blueprint for Jaguar “does raise the question of whether they will spin it off” as a separate company if its relaunch is successful.
