Jaguar Land Rover WILL build Electric Cars at Castle Bromwich says report

The Sunday Times says Jaguar Land Rover will announce this week that it’s to build electric cars at its Castle Bromwich Plant, starting with an electric XJ.

There isn’t a lot of good news around UK car manufacturing at the moment, and even what good news there is – like the new Astra being built on Merseyside – is conditional on Brexit.

But it looks like Jaguar Land Rover is about to make an announcement that will be good news for the UK, and that’s the arrival of electric car production in the UK, at Castle Bromwich, according to the Sunday Times.

Jaguar already makes the impressive i-Pace, but that’s made for Jaguar by Magna Steyr in Austria, but electric car production will ‘come home’ with three EVs being built in the Midlands.

The first will be a new electric Jaguar XJ, followed by an electric SUV (expected to  be an electric Range Rover), and plans are in place to have a six-week shutdown at Castle Bromwich to allow tooling for EVs to be installed.

JLR has already announced its new Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA), an electric-capable platform for large SUVs and saloons which can also accommodate plug-in and mild-hybrid drivetrains too, with the promise of enough batteries to deliver range of up to 300 miles.

Also in the mix is the new partnership between JLR and BMW to deliver electric gubbins for their EVs, and it all looks to be coming together as JLR look to dive in to EVs in a far bigger way than just the out-sourced i-Pace.

The announcement that JLR will be building EVs at Castle Bromwich is expected on Friday.