Jaguar Land Rover executives are considering purchasing a luxury car brand to bolster the group’s reach in an increasingly competitive market.
According to reports on Bloomberg, the Coventry car maker has financial support from parent company Tata to acquire another high-end manufacturer. JLR refused to comment on the matter when contacted by Autocar.
Unnamed sources told Bloomberg that a new brand joining Jaguar and Land Rover would likely already have invested in electrification and autonomous driving systems, which will become significantly more important for the group after 2020.
JLR has pledged to electrify every model in its range from the start of the next decade and it has been working with San Francisco-based Lyft by investing in driverless technology in an attempt to increase its expertise.
As part of an aggressive push to boost global sales, JLR has launched several new models that are based on a small number of platforms. The Velar is the latest product to spawn from this system, with the Audi Q5 rival sharing much of its structure and underpinnings with the Jaguar F-Pace.
Through increasing Tata investment, JLR is increasing its production capacity to meet demand. It opened a plant in China earlier this year, with another due to be completed in Slovakia next year.
JLR is officially the UK’s biggest car manufacturer, topping the second-biggest producer, Nissan, with 544,401 units produced last year compared with the Japanese brand’s 507,430.
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Aren't you forgetting the luxury brand owned by Aston Martin?
That could be made into hyper luxury RR and Bentley competitor -- if will exists to spend the necessary money.
What about...
Definitely throw this into the mix... Subaru. Would make sense on lots of levels. British links with Prodrive all make this fit together I reckon.
JIMBOB wrote:
Subaru are now inextricably linked with Toyota - not only with the joint production of the GT86 - but with a small (but significant) number of Subaru shares owned by Toyota.
A dormant name could be acquired to complement Jaguar and LR
In the distant heady days of Ford’s “Premier Automotive Group”, established, proven, luxury car makers were bought and sold for between GB £1 billion, and GB £2 billion. In these more rationale, pragmatic, days such extravagance is unnecessary.
To gain the economies of scale and benefits of “platform sharing”, need not involve the unnecessary extravagance of buying an already established, proven, luxury car maker, simply to then rationalise its engineering with that you already own.
There are a number of dormant names associated with the manufacture of luxury and executive vehicles, which could be acquired by Tata to complement Jaguar Land Rover, and gain the economies of scale and benefits of “platform sharing”, without any of the unnecessary extravagance mentioned above.