Jaguar Land Rover and BMW to co-develop ELECTRIC cars – but what about V8 Engines?

Jaguar Land Rover and BMW are joining forces to develop new technology for future electric cars, but what’s happened to the BMW V8 engine deal for JLR?

BMW came flying in to the new electric car space with its innovative and quirky i3 as far back as 2011 – although it took until 2013 for it to hit showrooms – and the equally innovative hybrid i8 on a similar timescale.

But BMW seems to have lost its way a bit on EVs in the intervening years, failing to capitalise on its early product.

Jaguar Land Rover, on the other hand, has been slow to the EV party, with seemingly half-hearted efforts to deliver hybrids and nothing on the EV front at all.

At least there was nothing from JLR on the electric car front until the Jaguar i-Pace hoved in to view as a cracking premium electric SUV, beating the premium competition to the market (well, if you exclude Tesla) and garnering multiple accolades along the way.

Now, from these diverse paths to electrification, Jaguar Land Rover and BMW are joining forces to co-develop electric drivetrain components for future EVs and hybrids, sharing development costs and cutting out duplication. It’s very pragmatic.

It will see Jaguar Land Rover and BMW working together at BMW’s Munich HQ to develop future EDUs, with the resulting components manufactured by JLR in the UK.

But this news made us wonder if this new cooperation between BMW and JLR will finally yield what we’ve been expecting for some time – BMW’s V8 engines in range-topping Jaguars and Land Rovers.

As far back as 2016 we reported that rumours were rife that JLR were planning a deal with BMW to replace their aging AJ-V8 with a BMW V8 – as there’s nothing viable to replace it in-house from the Ingenium engine base – which sounded rather appealing.

We heard nothing more until late last year when reports circulated that the new Jaguar F-Type would be the first JLR car to be fitted with a BMW V8. But, more than six months on, we’ve heard nothing more.

Maybe JLR has decided to give up on the V8 altogether? We do hope not.