Land Rover is preparing to start producing vehicles again, after shutting down the assembly lines at all of their European factories in late March due to the coronavirus. Although they will be restarting production, there will not be as many shifts or workers on the factory floor as there were before the outbreak of the pandemic.
The resumption will be gradual. There will be 2,000 employees reporting to work on Monday, building cars at the iconic Lode Lane factory in Solihull, England in one shift. That's 25% of Solihull's overall workforce. Similar workforces will return to the Halewood factory near Liverpool that builds Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport, and the Nitra, Slovakia plant that produces the Discovery 5 and Defender.
Jaguar Land Rover's Wolverhampton, England engine plant will slowly ramp up production as well, making the Ingenium engines that go into models across both brands' ranges.
Obviously, any return to work will incorporate all of the appropriate social distancing guidelines, to prevent the assembly line from becoming a COVID-19 hotspot.
With no production in over a month, combined with the lead time required to get Land Rover products to many of their major overseas markets, and the complications in the overall supply chain, starting production now will help keep the world in new Land Rovers throughout 2020. It also likely means that this year will not break last year's sales record.
It will also probably mean that the supply in America of 2020 Defenders will be very limited. Few, if any, new Defenders have been delivered to American customers. Deliveries were supposed to begin this spring, but the factory shut down due to the pandemic after just a few weeks of production. Some who placed orders for 2020 Defenders may end up converting them to orders for 2021 Defenders due to supply constraints -- a situation echoed among other high-demand vehicles, such as the new mid-engine Corvette.
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