When Jaguar dramatically announced last year that it would become an electric-only brand by 2025, the big question was how.
Would the storied brand go it alone and develop its own EV architecture, or would it share one with another automaker or, perhaps, an external supplier, such as Foxconn?
Overnight during an earnings call CEO Thierry Bollore answered that question.
“Concerning the new Jaguar, we’re making unique proportion a priority,” he told investors and the press. “That’s the reason why at the moment we do it by ourselves.”
Later in the call chief financial officer Adrian Mardell referred to the platform as Panthera. For those interested, panthera is the genus that jaguars, lions, leopards, snow leopards and tigers belong to.
In February 2021 Bollore, a few months into his job as CEO, announced Jaguar would become an EV-only brand 2025, and push itself upmarket to take on the likes of Bentley and Porsche.
Reports indicate Jaguar’s post-2025 lineup will consist of two crossover-style vehicles, and a two-door coupe.
The reduced model line will likely see Jaguar’s sales shrink further, but will hopefully see the brand return to profitability on the back of fatter margins.
A report in Le Monde last year indicated Jaguar’s current lineup will soldier on largely unchanged until the new EVs are launched in 2025.
The unreleased XJ
As part of the “Reimagine” plan unveiled in 2021, Jaguar cancelled the new XJ months before its scheduled launch, as well as the related J-Pace crossover.
The new XJ was to debut the automaker’s new MLA architecture, which supports internal combustion, mild hybrid, plug-in hybrid and pure electric drivetrains. The platform was eventually launched under the fifth-generation Range Rover.
MLA will now exclusively underpin large Range Rover and Land Rover models, while the yet-to-revealed EMA platform will be used for smaller Range Rover and Land Rover vehicles.
While Jaguar Land Rover’s latest model plan calls for the use of three architectures, Bollore said the company is looking to save money by sharing batteries, electric motors and control systems across all three platforms.
At present Jaguar only has one EV in its range: the I-Pace.
Although the EV crossover is well regarded — and won the 2019 World Car of the Year award — sales have been slow, and it only accounted for about three per cent of the brand’s global sales in 2021.
Keyword: Jaguar to develop its own EV platform