Jaguar Land Rover Evaluating Locales For North American Plant
The United Auto Workers may soon need to add another transplant to convert as part of its Southern strategy: Jaguar Land Rover is considering setting up shop in the Southeastern United States as part of its global expansion plans.
Autoblog reports the automaker is looking over potential real estate for a new North American factory, honing in upon right-to-work states in the South such as South Carolina, where BMW already has a presence in Spartanburg assembling the X Series. The future plant would have a total capacity of 200,000 units produced per year.
Elsewhere, JLR welcomed all to its new factory in Changsu, China, where the real Evoque — as opposed to the “If you like Mrs. Beckham’s crossover, you’ll love ours” Landwind E32 — will roll off the line, with the new Discovery Sport to follow. Brazil will join the party with its own factory in 2016.
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I hear there might be some available factory space in Toledo.
Makes sense. JLRs UK plants are close to full capacity these days and yet somehow they an to shoe horn twice as many models into the plants as they make currently. Only way they can do that is by making more cars locally so that more of their production lines can be converted into making more than one model at a time. Their Halewood plant currently makes the Evoque and the Discovery Sport in this way and yet is working 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The new Chinese plant will help by taking some pressure off. This will then allow them to potentially put another small SUV into Halewood. But if they have a US plant as well then that would also help.
Land Rover have a very good product (well, 2!) They're potent. I can see no reason why they would fail in the US. Then the results will follow investments ; so, well... slow growth at first I would think.
With only 60k sales in the US market, I don't know how JLR can justify building a plant here. They must have huge margins.