Jaguar Land Rover planning standalone SVR cars

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Jaguar Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) look set to deliver standalone SVR models as well as creating performance versions of the JLR range.

It’s only been nine months since Jaguar Land Rover officially launched its Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) to add another performance layer to its production cars.

But it’s starting to look like SVO has ambitions beyond merely being the division that sprinkles performance fairy dust and an SVR badge on Jaguar and Land Rover cars.

Speaking to Bloomberg, John Edwards, head of Jaguar Land Rover’s SVO division, said they are certainly looking at the possibility of creating standalone cars, and that they have the ability to do it.

But does that mean we’ll see cars from JLR like the AMG GT – a car that has no sibling in the main Mercedes range? We think not.

AMG has spent decades making Mercedes’ cars look more purposeful and perform more impressively, so there’s a cachet to the AMG brand JLR can’t hope to emulate less than a year after it launched. Who, for example, would think a car called an SVR GT would carry real kudos?

What seems far more likely is that JLR’s SVO division will be responsible not just for performance versions of existing Jaguars, Land Rovers and Range Rovers, but also for creating big-ticket, short run cars. Cars like the Aston Martin One-77, for example.

But, for now, we’ll have to wait and see where this plan is heading.