It looks like Land Rover products will be made in yet another country soon, as parent company Tata Motors looks to produce JLR products in a new factory in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
It looks like Land Rover products will be made in yet another country soon, as parent company Tata Motors looks to produce JLR products in a new factory in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Tamil Nadu is the “Detroit of India,” with a huge automotive manufacturing industry. It’s been burgeoning since the 1990s when Ford opened a factory there on the back of massive tax breaks. Most of the world’s major automakers now have some presence in the state, with three major ports focused around the state capital city of Chennai.
JLR started Indian manufacturing in 2011 when Freelander 2 (known as LR2 in North America) vehicles were built in CKD (complete knock-down) form at a factory in Pune. CKD manufacturing is different from full local manufacturing. A “CKD kit” gets sent to an overseas factory from the original facility (in this case, it was Land Rover’s Halewood, England plant), and then the kit is assembled locally to take advantage of tax and tariff benefits for local companies. Currently, the Range Rover Velar is produced in a single trim level at the Pune factory, also in CKD form.
The rumors swirling around the automotive industry right now say that JLR is going to use this new factory in Tamil Nadu to produce a fully-Indian JLR product. What would that mean? While powertrains might still be imported from the UK (where JLR has massive factories for both internal combustion and electric powerplants), other parts of the assembly process would be done in India. This would include the body stampings, interior trims, and the final assembly of all the parts.
The new factory might not just produce vehicles for the Indian market, either. Exports could be regional or even global – in the connected world of the 2020s, with manufacturing so easy to keep consistent, there’s no functional reason not to sell Indian-built Land Rovers on American lots alongside models from the “flagship factories” in the UK and Slovakia. However, once an automaker diversifies its production globally like this, it’s usually to reduce logistics and delivery times for regions – so it’s more likely we’d continue getting our vehicles from Europe, while the Indian vehicles would go to Asian, Australian, and African markets that would benefit from the proximity to the new factory.
While the rumors don’t go as far as saying which JLR vehicles would be produced in India, there is some logic that can be applied to slim down the possibilities. It’s highly unlikely that any vehicles from the Jaguar side of the business would be part of this plan since the new plan for the electric-only Jaguar is to be a low-volume, ultra-high-end manufacturer – something that can be more than fully accommodated in the UK. Often local production in a situation like this is done with a higher-volume, lower-priced model, where tariffs might chip into profits enough to make it difficult to sustain importing the vehicle. That would suggest something like the Range Rover Evoque, Range Rover Velar, or Discovery Sport – all popular vehicles at lower price points. As these vehicles are all getting electric-forward successors in the next few years on a new platform, we may also see the Tamil Nadu factory focused on the new EMA architecture.
Of course, JLR has not formally announced any of this, so we’ll wait and see!
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