After years of production cuts and chip shortages, Land Rover now finds itself in a position to finally ramp up production on the hot-selling Defender, with a third shift coming online at the Nitra, Slovakia factory.
After years of production cuts and chip shortages, Land Rover now finds itself in a position to finally ramp up production on the hot-selling Defender, with a third shift coming online at the Nitra, Slovakia factory.
The new Defender has had a strange life so far. Shown to the world in September 2019, early orders arrived in what turned out to be called "The Before Times." The UK press launch was canceled, with the vehicles donated to the British Red Cross for early Covid relief efforts. Soon after, the factory closed for several weeks of lockdown, with only a few thousand early orders delivered. Then, they reopened with social distancing in place on the assembly line, only to be caught up in supply chain crises in 2021 and 2022. In that time, they've also launched the 90 and 130 lengths in addition to the original 110 and brought out a number of special editions.
All the while, the Defender became a massively popular and successful vehicle, and of the 215,000 vehicles Jaguar Land Rover has back-ordered, a huge number of them are Defenders -- in fact, 74% of that back-order number is Defenders, and the new Range Rover and Range Rover Sport.
With this high demand for their hot flagships, JLR has heavily prioritized these three vehicles. The Nitra factory builds Defender and Discovery, but Discovery production has slowed to an absolute trickle -- only 1,488 Discoverys were sold in the United States in 2022, while 15,733 Defenders hit new driveways. At Solihull, where the Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Range Rover Velar, and Jaguar F-Pace are produced, the primary focus has gone onto the brand-new Range Rover lines, and the high-spec trims are huge profit centers for JLR, driving their return to profitability. At the Halewood factory, which produces the Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport, the plant has moved from two shifts to one, removing night shifts that paid a premium.
All of this seems to be happening to prioritize the available semiconductors -- more available than last year, but still not bountiful -- towards the three hot models. But with 160,000-plus on order, and more orders hitting the books every day, clearing the backlog will take a huge part of JLR's 2023 efforts.
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