Jaguar Land Rover Confirms Major Investment in UK Electric Vehicles' Industry Despite Brexit Worries

13:44 GMT, 5 July 2019

Demond Cureton

The news comes after JLR, which currently employs roughly 40,000 people across sites in Solihull, Castle Bromwich, Halewood and Wolverhampton, slashed roughly 4,500 jobs as part of its Project Charge and Acceleration restructuring programmes in January and posted record annual losses of £3.6bn.

Sputnik

UK automaker Jaguar Land Rover announced on Friday plans to safeguard the UK's car industry by building electric vehicles at its plant in Castle Bromwich in Birmingham.

The news comes after it blamed Brexit uncertainties, falling sales in China and market trends away from diesel, among others, for record year-to-year losses and falling demand.

The UK's largest motor company said that it also "calls on government and industry to work together to bring giga-scale battery production" to the UK, adding that the country's Battery Industrialisation Centre and UK government's Faraday Challenge were "essential to create "smaller, denser, cheaper batteries", as well as reduce dependence on outsourced materials.

CEO Ralf Speth said in a press release that the "future of mobility" was in electric vehicles and that JLR planned to co-locate its Electronic Drive Units electric vehicle manufacture to bring jobs back to the West Midlands region.

A JLR spokesperson also said that the Birmingham-based factory would produce its flagship saloon, the XJ.

JLR also recently moved production to Nitra in Slovakia and began manufacturing the I-Pace – its first electric car – at its plant in Magna Steyr, Austria in 2018.

Other car manufacturers such as Nissan, BMW, Ford and others have threatened to leave the UK or shifted production abroad, with US carmaker Ford most recently confirming it would close its Bridgend plant in Wales by 2020, resulting in 370 redundancies, including a further 620 cuts by 2020 and a total of up to 1,700 jobs at risk.