Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced its new global strategy, and it will see Jaguar going EV-only after 2025, and Land Rover introducing six pure electric variants in the next five years. Called ‘Reimagine’, the British company is quite literally staking its future on electrification, investing £2.5bn per year to make it happen.

The company’s new CEO, Thierry Bollore, set out the so-called Reimagine plan on January 15, in what is the biggest shake-up of the Jaguar and Land Rover brands since they were bought by Tata in 2008.

At its centre is the move to electrification across both brands. For Jaguar, it will ditch ICE altogether from 2025 having “undergone a renaissance to emerge as a pure electric luxury brand with a dramatically beautiful new portfolio of emotionally engaging designs and pioneering next-generation technologies”. Perhaps surprisingly, given its prevalence in the media over the last two years, the electric XJ will not feature in the line-up.

For Land Rover, six pure electric models will be launched over the next five years, albeit the first isn’t set to arrive until 2024. By 2030, Land Rover expects 60 per cent of cars sold to be EVs, and taking into account both brands, they will offer electric models on a ‘nameplate by nameplate’ basis by 2030.

To facilitate this transition to EVs, each brand is developing all-new vehicle architectures. Land Rover will use its Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA) heavily during the transition period, with electrified internal combustion (e.g. plug-in hybrids) being joined by pure EVs on the platform in time. It is also developing an Electric Modular Architecture (EMA) which will support future Land Rover EVs.

Jaguar will build all its models on a new architecture, the details of which are yet to be released.

This reduced number of platforms is part of an overall rationalisation of JLR’s business which it is calling ReFocus. Through this it hopes to establish new standards in efficiency and quality, whilst supporting local economy and supply chains. These will be centred on its Solihull plant in the West Midlands where development and production of the Jaguar pure electric platform will take place. Global opportunities will also be leveraged.

Whilst production looks to be largely protected, JLR is planning to rationalise non-manufacturing operations in the UK. An example of this is the company’s management functions moving into Gaydon instead of being homed separately.

Through all of this, JLR’s ambition is to achieve net zero carbon emissions throughout its supply chain and operations by 2039. Alongside its EV focus, the brand will continue to work on building a hydrogen economy through fuel cell technology. Prototype fuel cell vehicles will take to the road in the next 12 months, according to the brand.

Thierry Bollore said: “The Reimagine strategy allows us to enhance and celebrate that uniqueness like never before. Together, we can design an even more sustainable and positive impact on the world around us.”

Discover EV’s take

This is a bold move by Jaguar Land Rover, and one of the most ambitious by an established, mainstream manufacturer globally. It strikes us as a sensible one, however: Jaguar has struggled to compete with its German rivals so pitching it ahead of the game offers a point of difference it has long been lacking. Leaving Land Rover to catch up plays on its strengths, too, giving its worldwide customer base more options for longer before making the switch to EV-only.