Jaguar Land Rover announced a major corporate reshuffle, which includes £15 billion in investment in EV technology and a major rebrand of the Land Rover line-up.
Jaguar Land Rover announced a major corporate reshuffle, which includes £15 billion in investment in EV technology and a major rebrand of the Land Rover line-up.
This news dropped with headlines like "JLR Kills off Land Rover brand," which is not exactly accurate. Land Rover is now called a "Trust Mark," a term used in the luxury goods world to denote icons on goods that suggest their heritage, quality, or components. This "Trust Mark," which is the Land Rover oval, will appear on products from JLR's "House of Brands," which are the three lines previously referred to as "Product Families" -- Range Rover, Defender, and Discovery.
To de-press-release-ify this, basically this is Land Rover's latest attempt to fix a problem they have had going back to the 1970s when they launched their second product line with the Range Rover. The original Range Rover, in 1970, came with a badge that said "by Land Rover" in the corner. Until 1989, the Defender was the "Land Rover Ninety/One-Ten," with the Defender name only introduced to differentiate it from the new Land Rover Discovery. Further complications came with the introduction of the brand to North America in 1987 as "Range Rover," and the introduction of Range Rover Sport in 2005 leading to the subdivision of the various product names. Around 2010, Land Rover attempted a similar split with the intention to sell Range Rover as a standalone product. By the time they merged it back into the main line, it hadn't gotten much further than adding Range Rover signs to dealerships and switching the center caps on wheels to say Range Rover.
All of this has piled into a situation where there is no consistency of nomenclature for any of these vehicles. People say they drive a "Range Rover," when they in fact drive what is legally called a "Land Rover Range Rover Sport." There is confusion in the marketplace as to what is a Range Rover, what a Defender is, and which of these are Land Rovers. Enthusiasts can tell the difference, but many in the general marketplace can't. The idea here is to market each product line to the demographic that buys it, under the product name they refer to it as already.
The three "Brand families" are also moving more toward different demographics. The new Range Rovers are moving more and more into the stratosphere of luxury, while Defender fills a more outdoorsy niche that had been somewhat left behind for a while. Discovery fills a family-oriented niche, and though it's a bit latent right now with the soft-selling Discovery 5, there is clear intent to grow this division in the next update.
All of these vehicles continue to be sold at Land Rover dealers, advertised on Land Rover websites and will carry Land Rover badges on their grilles. The difference will mostly be in the marketing. Already, we can see it with this weekend's Land Rover Three-Day Event equestrian event in Kentucky. The Defender brand is exclusively highlighted, and the focus is on promoting Defenders to outdoorsy equestrian families. Meanwhile, Range Rover events have taken place at luxury ski resorts and at Monterey Car Week, with the Range Rover brand played up and the Land Rover overarching brand played down.
It is the latest attempt to try and reconcile Land Rover's long and confusing brand heritage. As the only surviving part of the Rover Company, and intended to last only a few years to boost cashflow in post-War Britain before it became a runaway success, not much thought was ever given to naming or branding the Land Rover -- the fact that Rover gelled nice and adventure-y with the prefix Land was just good luck. The Range Rover debuted as a related, but somewhat separate, division of the Rover Company, and thus the chaos began. There will never be a perfect way to reconcile it, with the company sitting on four incredibly strong brands that somewhat conflict with each other -- their three nameplates and the overarching manufacturer Land Rover -- and it would not be a huge shock if in five years we've moved on from "Trust Marks" and "House of Brands" to something else.
Among the smoldering ruins of this announcement, JLR also announced some other things. First off, the company is now referred to as "JLR" instead of "Jaguar Land Rover." There were also announcements made about the future of Jaguar, which is entering its final model year of selling internal combustion vehicles in 2024. The first EV Jaguar will be a four-door grand tourer, built at Solihull on the new "Jaguar Electric Architecture" (JEA).
The Halewood factory outside Liverpool will become an EV-only factory, and it is likely that Range Rover Evoque, Discovery Sport, and possibly Range Rover Velar will transition to EV-only vehicles in their next generation. The larger vehicles -- Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Defender, and the Discovery 6 -- will be built on the Modular Longitudinal Architecture that underpins the latest Range Rovers, allowing for battery, internal combustion, or hybrid options to "give JLR uncompromised flexibility to adapt its vehicle line up to meet the needs of different markets around the world, that are moving at different speeds towards carbon net zero targets." Each model family will offer a fully-electric model.
The Engine Manufacturing Centre at Wolverhampton will build EV drive units alongside ICE motors, and the historic Jaguar factory at Castle Bromwich will become an expanded body stamping factory, retaining jobs there.
While it remains to see how Land Rover will develop as an umbrella brand, and how long this iteration of Land Rover's marketing lasts, it was certainly a way to ring in a 75th anniversary.
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