Jaguar Land Rover show their BIG commitment to the UK – at least in design

Jaguar Land Rover has unveiled its new advanced product creation centre at Gaydon, a new facility bringing JLR’s creative processes in to one place.

It’s no secret Jaguar Land Rover is having a bit of a bad time; sales have dropped because of diesel and China and Brexit and anything else JLR can point to as a factor and, despite having some truly cracking cars, there are big gaps in their offerings and some troublesome overlaps in their model range.

So now may not seem the right time to unveil a big new advanced Creation Centre at Gaydon – an investment of around half a billion – when so much needs fixing.

But this new creative centre at Gaydon was planned three years ago when there were fewer clouds on the horizon, but despite the growing headwinds JLR has persevered without, seemingly, cost -cutting or down-scaling the project, and have created a stunning creative environment to develop future Jaguar Land Rovers and advanced technologies.

Sitting bang in the middle of JLR’s Gaydon site, the new centre brings together Jaguar and Land Rover design in to one 4,000,000m² site, delivering more than 50,000m² of new innovative workspace in a building in the UK’s top 10 per cent of sustainable non-domestic buildings, with 20 per cent of its energy coming from a big solar bank on-site and the rest from renewable resources.

It should all lead to a future where Jaguar and Land Rovers are designed more cohesively, with better integrated interiors and exteriors in a free-flowing design environment designed from the start to stimulate innovation and creativity. 

All of which is great, and we look forward to future Jaguars and Land Rovers, like the Jaguar J-Pace and Electric XJ, being more complete cars.

But we do worry this is a commitment just to the future of design and innovation in the UK for JLR, whilst the manufacturing and production leave the UK for cheaper facilities. Just like the new Land Rover Defender and Land Rover Discovery.

We’ll see.