Jaguar Land Rover makes reliability its top priority

Tuesday, 6 July 2021

Jaguar Land Rover’s new boss, Thierry Bollore, is working hard to bring the two British brands back into the green. He has already pledged to convert JLR to electric power completely by 2025 but before that, he wants to get JLR’s reliability back on track.

Talking to Autocar UK, Bollore said that sorting JLR’s well-known quality issues is the first pillar of the company’s new Reimagine plan.

“This is the first pillar of Reimagine, our transformation plan,” Bollore explained to the British publication. “Our results have been unacceptable, but we know how to fix them. It’s not science, just hard work. Already the 2021 results are better, but we have more to do.”

Before it goes fully electric, Jaguar Land Rover’s new boss wants to fix the reliability issues.

“We now have a member of the board responsible for the whole value chain, which makes a big difference,” he added.

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Those results include a one-third drop in warranty costs from MY2021 vehicles. Bollore said JLR is overhauling the way it develops its models, adding more tech and digital design on top of common systems in order to improve the quality of components and how they integrate into the process.

For an uncomfortably long time, Jaguar Land Rover has floated near the bottom of quality surveys done by groups like JD Power. In fact, poor performance in China led to protests outside the brand’s Shanghai office back in 2018.

Following the quality and reliability side of things, JLR wants to become a net-zero carbon business by 2039, with a “dramatically beautiful new portfolio of emotionally engaging designs and pioneering next-generation technologies” coming to support the goal.

Sadly, this won’t include the long-rumoured fully electric XJ. 'Following a thorough technology review against the exponential change in the automotive industry, we concluded that the planned XJ replacement does not fit with our vision for a reimaged Jaguar brand,” the brand said.

The new models will look to occupy a unique space of their own in the market as well, instead of directly competing with rivals.

“Today, when you listen to customers, they see [a Jaguar], like the car and test the car, and they still go and buy an Audi or a BMW. That’s the problem. People buy the originals, then. We aren’t the originals. We have to get the positioning of Jaguar much different, higher and more original,” Bollore previously told Autocar UK.

He went on to say that he wants Jaguar to emulate the same sort of business model and positioning as Range Rover, meaning building uniquely sized and styled cars at price points that come in higher than its conventional rivals.

Jaguar also “won’t seek to create targeted rivals” for Porsche, Bentley or even Aston Martin.

Instead, the plan is for Jaguar to create “distinct cars with no overlap”. They will be “really modern luxury cars that are the copy of nothing in style or design, the top of technology and refinement, but not looking backwards”.

It will also no longer pursue the SUV cash cow, at least in great earnest. Autocar UK says that Jaguar will instead focus on uniquely shaped, lower-slung cars with no direct rivals.

The only SUV – and, in fact, the only current-generation Jaguar – to survive into the new wave of models will be the I-Pace, as a “permanently and significantly updated” electric SUV.