The clue is in the title. We’re Auto Express and we ensure that the cars are the stars. But occasionally, people deserve as much coverage as products – and this is one of those occasions.
The question I posed in this column a month ago was: could JLR’s owner, Tata of India, make some of its Jaguars and Land Rovers in the USA? Unsurprisingly, JLR’s massive, Mumbai-based parent company failed to answer it. But JLR CEO Adrian Mardell did. Well, sort of.
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“We had, and currently have, no cause to build cars in the US at this time, but we cannot discount that it could be the case at some point,” he said.
I interpret these words to mean that he’s very much leaving the door open for the possibility of a newly built US factory or factories to accompany those production lines he has in Brazil, China, India and Slovakia.
JLR is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a 50,000 square foot technology hub in Portland and elsewhere in America. The company’s ‘Reimagine’ strategy remains in place with an official “rethink everything we do” philosophy. And Mardell is a former Chief Transformation Officer (honest) at JLR. So if you can strip away the emotion and instead concentrate on the logic, the logistics and the global political climate, it’s not difficult to imagine JLR having US production lines at some point.
