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Jaguar Land Rover says it will spend £15 billion ($18.7 billion) over the next five years on EVs and autonomous driving technology. The company has been slower than its rivals to adopt electric vehicles.
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Jaguar Land Rover will invest £15 billion ($18.7 billion) over the next five years in electric and autonomous vehicle technology, the automaker announced Wednesday. The company identified its Halewood plant in the UK for conversion to an all-EV manufacturing facility. And by 2030, JLR says it will be an “electric first, modern luxury carmaker.”
The first medium-size all-electric Range Rover will be out in 2025, and JLR will begin to take orders for it later this year. The vehicle will be built using JLR’s electrified modular architecture (EMA), which will power the company’s upcoming slate of EVs. JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, has previously committed to making its Jaguar-branded vehicles all-electric by 2025.
JLR’s plans are ambitious, but the automaker has previously been slow to embrace electrification. Its only fully electric car to date is the Jaguar I-Pace SUV, which has struggled to make inroads against more established electric carmakers. Even then, the car is built by a contractor, rather than being produced by JLR in-house. Meanwhile, competitors like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi have been ramping up their switch to EVs and offer a full range of plug-in model types.
For its part, Jaguar will start producing its new lineup of EVs in 2024, starting with a four-door grand tourer to be assembled at the automaker’s Solihull factory. Jaguar is targeting a range of 430 miles (700km) and a starting price of £100,000. It will be the first of three new EVs to come out in the coming years.
There isn’t much detail on the company’s investment in autonomous vehicles aside from a commitment to spend some of its money on “autonomous, AI and digital technologies.” JLR has a deal with Waymo in which the Alphabet-owned company works with the automaker to outfit its I-Pace electric SUVs with autonomous driving hardware and software. Waymo is operating a fleet of its autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles in California and Arizona.
JLR previously struck a deal with Nvidia to install high-powered computers in its vehicles for advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving features. Starting in 2025, all JLR vehicles will come with Nvidia’s end-to-end Drive Hyperion platform installed.