Jaguar Land Rover boss Thierry Bolloré has pledged to solve the firm’s reliability and quality issues once for all.
Bolloré, who assumed the role of CEO last autumn, says a lot of progress has already been made in what he describes as the first priority of his ‘Reimagine’ plan to turn the company’s fortunes around.
“This is the first pillar of Reimagine, our transformation plan,” said Bolloré. “Our results have been unacceptable, but we know how to fix them. It’s not science, just hard work. Already the 2021 results are better, but we have more to do.”
One of Bolloré’s first acts just a month after joining Jaguar Land Rover was to appoint Nigel Blenkinsop to a new board position, executive director of company quality and customer satisfaction, reporting directly to the Frenchman.
“We now have a member of the board responsible for the whole value chain, which makes a big difference,” said Bolloré.
Progress made has included a one-third drop in warranty costs from 2021-model-year cars. Bolloré is also overhauling the way JLR develops its models, introducing more technology and digital design on common systems that improves the quality of components and how they integrate at the beginning of the process.
“We’re improving processes to get better quality by design,” said Bolloré.
Jaguar and Land Rover models have long been plagued by quality and reliability issues globally. In the most recent (2020) What Car? Reliability Survey, Land Rover finished last out of 31 car makers, with a score of 78.2%, almost 10% worse than the brand directly above it.
Poor performance in China notably led to protests outside JLR’s Shanghai headquarters in 2018.
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Thierry Bolloré, when are you going to actually start doing this? This is complete hogwash, just another lying CEO trying to save face in front of their investors.
JLR has been torturing me for the last 6 months after selling me a lemon CPO F-Type R. This car has had total electrical failure 9 times, but JLR corporate has forced me to sue them rather than do the right thing and buy the car back.
Good luck repairing your image. I'm going to every single automotive publication to tell my story. Your franchisees are out of control and use customers as guinea pigs. You are getting your own customers killed with your dogshit vehicles. This is not a game, we are talking about lives and livelihoods at stake here.
Frankly, some of the engineering and especially the electrical systems, simply aren't up to scratch. Therefore it is not just a matter of being a bit more careful when putting them together (though that would help), in many cases they need re-engineering and then thoroughly testing for reliability, prior to release.
JLR have been using the customers to find even the most basic of faults for many years, rather than developing a proper testing programme.