Jaguar Land Rover boss says car plants in UK are not under threat
The chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover has said the future of the carmaker’s UK factories will not come under threat even if it has to source electric car batteries from Europe.
The comments came amid closely watched negotiations between JLR’s owner, the Indian conglomerate Tata, and the governments of the UK and Spain over where to build a “gigafactory” capable of manufacturing hundreds of thousands car batteries a year.
Tata has asked for hundreds of millions of pounds of government support.
Adrian Mardell, JLR’s chief executive, on Friday said Tata was “looking at the final determination” on where to build, but that the decision could go against the UK if there were a “cost disadvantage” compared with other locations.
Many executives in the UK car industry say the failure to attract more gigafactories could leave the country falling behind in the race to build electric vehicles and create secure manufacturing jobs. Mardell said it “would be wonderful” if the factory were in the UK, but that it was “not a threat to us” if JLR were to source batteries from elsewhere in Europe.
“I don’t believe it will impact where we build models,” he said, adding the company was committed to the UK.
However, he said he believed European carmakers will struggle to find enough batteries made within the UK or EU to meet increasingly strict requirements, known as rules of origin, on the proportion of parts sourced from within the region.
Mardell’s comments came as the carmaker revealed it lost £64m in its latest financial year, although it performed much better in recent months as the global shortage in computer chips eased.
It was the second consecutive annual loss for the carmaker, but its fortunes improved over the winter, and it made a
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