Jaguar Land Rover and Bentley will temporarily suspend production at their UK manufacturing plants amid the coronavirus pandemic.
JLR’s production operations in Castle Bromwich, Halewood and Solihull will all be halted “over the course of next week”. The three plants assemble around half a million cars per year - about a third of the UK’s total passenger car output.
The production line at Bentley’s facility in Crewe will grind to a halt today. Last year the plant - Bentley's sole manufacturing facility - produced just over 11,000 cars globally,
Both British car makers intend to restart production on or around 20 April, but only if it's deemed safe and necessary to do so.
The pair are some of the last major, mass-production car makers in the UK to temporarily suspend production as the pandemic’s disruption affects all areas of business. BMW, Honda, Nissan, Rolls-Royce, Toyota and Vauxhall have also suspended production at their British sites.
However, neither Aston Martin nor McLaren have closed their facilities or declared publicly that they intend to do so. Aston Martin sold just over 5800 cars in 2019, while McLaren sold 4700.
Smaller car factories, such as those of Caterham and Morgan, appear to remain open at this stage.
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Opening April 20th..........It's not gonna happen..........
Both are going to re-open on 20th April?..................It's not gonna happen, is it? Boris says it's gonna take at least 12 weeks to conquer CVID-19, so the car industry ain't gonna get back to normal for at least another 6 months, is it? Also, what cars do Bently make in Germany?
I was surprised JLR have
I was surprised JLR have managed to keep production going so long. But then it occurred to me that they have a large supply of parts built up for Brexit. So that's probably how they did it.