UK Government Underwriting £1.5b Loan to Jaguar Land Rover After Cyber-Attack

(Unfortunately, so is the outsourced IT contract...)

The jobs, and the factories, are still in the West Midlands where they've always been.

I expect you know this already, so why are Jaguar not selling any cars?

I am loathed to beat up on EVs, but Jaguar were early to market with a model that didn't sell well, except to Google for their self driving cars. It was a good car, as SUVs go, but they did not update it, and, in the home market, PHEVs from other brands hit the sweet spot of price, tax benefits, resale value and range.

Furthermore, Jaguar didn't actually make the iPace, it was outsourced to Magna Steyr in Austria.

There is also a demographic problem. The customer base is elderly. They want their brrm brrm noises from lots of cylinders in a V configuration. Selling cars to them would not be a problem, however, there are penalties for manufacturers that can't achieve low emissions across the fleet. Had there been lots of EV sales then this would have worked out. But it didn't, making their sports cars and big luxury sedans economically unviable.

The likes of Ferrari, McLaren, Aston Martin and others that only sell a small amount of cars get exemptions, but Jaguar was a different business model to that, with an expectation to sell hundreds of thousands of cars a year, ideally, so no exemption possible.

They also had a problem sourcing engines from the Ford plant in Bridgend, South Wales. Due to Brexit and other factors, Ford quit manufacturing in the UK, so that plant closed in 2020.

So they have had to cut free from their customer base to start over with something new for a new type of customer. They have pivoted. The plan now is to make EVs in the UK and to chase just the luxury market with a lower expectation of sales volume.

The "bailout" says more about Tata's approach to supplier relations than it does about brand risk. Not that Tata is much different than any other abusive conglomerate.

This is akin to being "forced" to do the right thing by the UK government. Do we really believe that Tata Group couldn't afford this?