The first UK-made Jaguar electric car is to be a £100,000 four-door grand tourer, the vehicle’s manufacturer has announced.
The UK’s largest carmaker said its first British car to run fully on batteries will be made in the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) Solihull plant in the West Midlands and will be available in selected markets next year.
A separate UK JLR factory, in Halewood, Merseyside, will also go fully electric in due course, the company announced on Wednesday.
Exactly when is not known but a company spokesperson said electric cars will begin rolling off the production line in the first six months of 2025.
The investment is the organisation’s attempt to catch up with luxury rivals, such as BMW and Mercedes, which already have a range of electric vehicles on the market.
In an effort to facilitate its electric car production, JLR’s owner, Indian multinational conglomerate Tata, had asked the government for millions in support to build a gigafactory to make car batteries.
A decision has yet to be made on where the factory will be located, throwing the future of the UK car industry into question.
There are currently no gigafactories in the UK and the company behind a planned gigafactory, Britishvolt, entered into and was bought out of administration earlier this year.
At an event on Wednesday to announce the plans, the JLR chief executive was firm that his company would be an anchor customer of the factory but would not be building a gigafactory itself.
“That is not within our plans,” Adrian Mardell told reporters.
“Tata will be building a gigafactory. We are clear it’s going to be in Europe. A final destination hasn’t yet been chosen.”
Spain is reportedly a rival option to the UK for the battery plant and a decision on the project is said to be imminent, though it would take at least four years for the factory to be up and running.
If batteries are shipped from Spain, the cost of producing cars in the UK would be large.
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JLR have not said where they would source the batteries for the UK factories.
The Jaguar brand set itself a deadline of 2025 to become all-electric but it currently only has one electric car on the market, which is made in Austria.
JLR has said it will meet the government’s target of selling only electric vehicles by 2030.
News Source: news.sky.com
