Jaguar Land Rover is gradually reopening order books on cheaper models most affected by the chip crisis, including the Jaguar XE and Jaguar XF saloons, UK sales director Paddy McGillycuddy has said.
JLR in recent months has prioritised its limited chip supply for its three largest, most profitable models: the Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and Land Rover Defender. As a consequence, 75% of JLR’s 200,000-plus forward orders globally are for those three models, the company has said. The same is true of the 50,000-order backlog in the UK, McGillycuddy told Autocar.
The strategy has meant customers have been unable to order certain core JLR models, or faced delivery times stretching over 12 months. “In managing our chip supply, we had to prioritise where chips go,” McGillycuddy said. “So for Discovery Sport, we restricted ordering down to a limited number of derivatives.”
Read more: Jaguar, Defender, Discovery and Range Rover split in JLR agency shift
Currently, just three out 12 Discovery Sport models are available to order on the Land Rover UK website, all of them plug-in hybrids. Delivery of those will take nine to 12 months, the website said.
However, JLR has opened the order books again on the Jaguar XE and XF saloons after a long period of intermittent availability. “XE and XF were shut for ordering, but we have just recently reopened them for the new model year,” McGillycuddy said. JLR sold just 312 British-built XEs and 399 XFs globally to dealers in the last three months of 2022, company figures show.
Among other Jaguar models, ordering is now “widely open” for the F-Pace SUV, the I-Pace SUV and the F-Type sports car, with the E-Pace “slightly restricted”, McGillycuddy said. Currently, six out of 12 E-Pace models are being shown as unavailable.
Among Land Rover’s models, the Discovery has been hardest hit in terms of sales as JLR focuses on its globally best-selling Defender model, built in the same factory. Currently, no Discovery is showing as being available for delivery in less than six months, with four models at more than 12 months. The entry D250 diesels are showing as unavailable. Just 1984 units of the Discovery were sold to dealers in the final quarter of 2022 globally, JLR figures show.
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Just think how huge the sales figures for the Discovery would have been if JLR hadn't had to restrict them..
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The world's worst automotive CEO Thierry Bollore used the semiconductor shortages to kill off Jaguar. Maybe the new CEO is finally going to keep Jaguar going, and walk it through a hybrid period that it needs?
Note - No other marque has been as badly affected as JLR claims to be with this shortage. Every other one seems to have navigated thand adapted to keep car flowing out the factories. JLR and Bollore failed Jaguar.
The trouble is that Bollore nearly crashed Renault but got shoved out before he ran it off the road. Peugeot inherited around 40 of its most senior execs as a direct or indirect result of Bollore and yet.... we had dear old Autocar trumpeting him as JLR's salvation. They needed astonishingly strong leadership through Brixit/Covid/Chipgeddon and were saddled with someone that my Renault friend (who happened to retire shortly before Ballore's reign at Renault) as the instigator of a massive shift to politics. JLR senior managment, of which I was one, has always been prone to fiefdoms. Being led by the instigator-in-chief just let the place revert to the way it used to be before David Smith managed to right JLR for awhile. But now, the Jaguar ship may be holed too badly.