The race for electric vehicles is hotting up. Tata Motors, the parent company of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), is searching for a partner. It needs help to move Jaguar to a new product architecture, which aims to transform the brand to an all-electric luxury brand from 2025.
Jaguar is set to become 100 percent electric before 2030 as part the 2021 ‘Reimagine’ strategy.
SUV-specialist Land Rover aims to have at least six pure electric variants by 2026. This is the biggest reshuffle for the two British brands since their buyout by Tata Motors in 2008.
At the recently held Investor Day Virtual Conference, JLR’s newly appointed CEO Thierry Bolore, said that a screening process for the partner is already in progress with several entities keen to come on board.
“In order to deliver on our vision of distinct personalities for both brands, Jaguar will have a completely separate architecture from 2025. This is a design-led process. We are creating a new market position for Jaguar, one that is aspirational and technologically engaging for the discerning modern luxury customer”, said Bolore.
He added: “To deliver that vision, we have already begun an extensive screening process for a potential partner. Naturally there is a massive appetite to work with us, but equally, the option of developing our own is still a possibility. We know we can compete. We know we can deliver it. We have many years of experience now with the Jaguar I-PACE to draw upon and we have some of the best talent in the industry capable of delivering that vision.”
As the nature of the partnership that JLR has in mind was unclear from Bolore’s statements, the global communications manager at the company, responding to a question from Moneycontrol, said “It is too early to comment on the specifics of this”.
Moneycontrol wanted to know if JLR was looking for equity participation from the partner or was it examining a non-equity-based alliance, like its existing partnership with US-based Waymo and Germany's BMW.
Jaguar has been consistently underperforming for JLR. Sales during the April-December period last year was the worst since FY16. During the nine months of 2020, Jaguar clocked retails of 74,206 units, down 34 percent compared to 112,305 units sold in the same period in FY20. FY19 was the best year for Jaguar since the takeover, recording a full year, world-wide retail sale of 180,198 units.
Bolore also acknowledged that the mismatch in product offerings and below par customer satisfaction levels had impacted the Jaguar brand, leading to low volumes.
“We all know that the challenges, which we carried into the COVID year, were internal. Our Jaguar business has not performed, our product range contents overlaps, impacting our profitability. Our manufacturing capacity and operational organization is not structured for maximum efficiency and despite visible improvements in quality, our customer satisfaction level is too low, which impacts our warranty costs and prevents us from getting back to our natural volumes”, he added.
JLR decided to scrap plans of launching the electric version of the Jaguar XJ sedan despite the model being nearly production-ready. Jaguar presently has only one fully-electric model, I-Pace, on sale globally, which would make its India debut on March 23.
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