Jaguar cars will be electric-only by 2025 as part of a wide-reaching overhaul by its parent company Jaguar Land Rover.
The struggling luxury marque will abandon the internal combustion engine as JLR targets net zero carbon emissions by 2039. Its stablemate, Land Rover, will launch six electric cars in the next five years but will sell hybrid cars for the next 15 years.
JLR, owned by India’s Tata conglomerate, said it would “substantially reduce and rationalise” management in the UK, where it employs 30,000 people. The company did not put a figure on job cuts but pledged no compulsory redundancies in the UK.
The group said it would spend £2.5bn a year developing electric technology for its models and that all models would be available in a battery version by the end of the decade. The first all-electric Land Rover will hit the road in 2024.
The company said it would keep all its factories open, sparing the Castle Bromwich plant in the West Midlands whose future was in doubt. The site, which employs more than 2,000 people, will not build new models and will absorb non-car manufacturing as car manufacturing winds down.
Chief Executive Thierry Bolloré is seeking to revive the business after JLR plunged to a £422m loss for the year to the end of March 2020. JLR was hit by the Covid-19 crisis but it had fallen behind rivals in developing electric cars and suffered from over-reliance on diesel engines that are out of favour after the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
The company was also affected by Brexit and a general drop-off in car sales that has hit the whole industry.
Bolloré, the former boss of Renault, joined in September. He promised to keep to keep all “core plants” open but said global manufacturing would be “rightsized, repurposed and reorganised”.
The Unite union said it broadly supported the plan in the context of pressures on the car industry.
Des Quinn, Unite’s national officer for automotive industries, said: “Assurances of no plant closures and no compulsory job losses have been sought and given, and it is on this basis only that we will work with the company to meet the challenges of the future.”
