Jaguar Land Rover to reduce production by 25% over five years, to write off scrapped product investment

Jaguar Land Rover will be cutting its production capacity by 25% over a span of five years, and will be writing off investment into products that have been scrapped from its plans under the leadership of new CEO Thierry Bollore, Automotive News reported.

According to an investor presentation, the British manufacturer will take a non-cash charge of around GBP1 billion (RM5.67 billion) in the quarter ending March, related to previous higher spending and earlier projects it will no longer complete, such as the previously planned (but now cancelled) replacement for the Jaguar XJ. The automaker has also lowered its break-even point from 600,000 units to 400,000 units, it was reported by Automotive News as saying.

Part of the new business plan under Bollore is for Jaguar to step further upmarket and become a range of fully electric vehicles by 2025, which will see the marque use a pure electric drive architecture in place of the Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA) planned for the now-scrapped XJ, that would also have been fully electric. The MLA platform will continue to be developed for Land Rover products.

One casualty is the XJ, a nameplate that will live on with a different model

Previously at the announcement of the group’s new strategy named Reimagine, the automaker said it will not close any manufacturing facilities, but instead emphasise ‘quality over volume’, which will see Land Rover continue to retain its off-roading credibility as Jaguar takes the all-electric direction.

Land Rover will be significantly increasing the electrification of its line-up too, as the SUV brand also aims to have 60% of its line-up become fully electric by the time Jaguar has gone fully electric, which will go some way to limiting the former’s vulnerability to the UK’s ban on sales of internal combustion vehicles.

The first of these from Solihull will arrive in 2024, the start of a queue of six new fully electric models to arrive within the next five years across the Range Rover, Discovery and Defender model ranges. Beyond battery EVs, Jaguar Land Rover has also committed to long-term investment in hydrogen fuel cell technology, and the automaker has said that road trials for fuel-cell prototypes will begin in the next 12 months.

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