Jaguar Land Rover’s challenges are much publicised and ongoing but could a tie-up with German car maker BMW prove to be its salvation?
In June the two companies announced plans to work together on electric drive units (EDUs) for the next generation of electric vehicles
But speculation is mounting that it could be just the start of a much closer working relationship.
It has been suggested Jaguar Land Rover is poised to make use of a BMW small car platform and that the German car maker is also set to supply it with four and six-cylinder engines.
Given Jaguar Land Rover’s heavy losses for the last financial year, ongoing difficulties in the Chinese market, declining demand for diesel vehicles and uncertainty over Brexit, some sort of partnership is inevitable - indeed the board of parent company Tata has made that clear.
There was speculation recently about a PSA Group takeover of the Coventry car maker but that seems to have faded, meaning forging closer links with BMW could provide a way forward.
Given that the seismic shift to electric power in the industry requires monumental investment working together on that journey makes perfect sense.
So, is the developing partnership between Jaguar Land Rover and BMW a marriage made in heaven?
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BusinessLive caught up with Warwickshire automotive expert Dr Charles Tennant, a man who knows Jaguar Land Rover very well and has been charting its challenges for some time.
Formerly Land Rover’s chief engineer, Mr Tennant also served on the board at Tata Technologies.
Here’s our Q&A with Mr Tennant.
What opportunities and possibilities does a BMW partnership throw up?
Charles Tennant (CT): When Jaguar Land Rover announced a technical collaboration with BMW to develop electric vehicles, I said that it would need to be more than just the sum of component technologies around electronic drive units.
The real opportunity lay in developing and sharing modular vehicle platforms across JLR and BMW.
Since then reports have suggested this will indeed be the case, as well as BMW supplying 4 and 6-cylinder gasoline engines in standard and hybrid form.
But the bigger story here is the talk of JLR and BMW sharing an advanced front-wheel drive small car platform called FAAR.
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This would initially produce two baby Jaguars – a small SUV and coupe crossover – but will be extended to include replacement vehicles for the Range Rover Evoque and Land Rover Discovery Sport models, and maybe a baby urban-focussed Land Rover as well.
All would share the same platform as the Mini Countryman and BMW X1 vehicles, and forecast sales volume for the platform are huge at 1.5 million, but more importantly it would take JLR into new white space for them, which has been woefully lacking – the sub £30k vehicle.
These smaller vehicles should put JLR back on the sales growth trajectory, and with hybrid engines followed by electric vehicles will also go a long way to achieving the next round of EU fleet C02 emissions legislation due in 2025.
The savings will be in the billions of pounds and will come at an opportune time for JLR, with plunging sales and profits starving the company of much needed investment in autonomous, connected, electric, shared technology for future vehicles.
What is platform sharing and why is it so popular?
CT: Platform sharing is not a new engineering phenomenon in the automotive industry, but is now being utilised to a higher degree than ever before, in order to share the investment burden and reduce time to market for new vehicles.
It is distinct from ‘badge engineering’ which is more prevalent in the commercial vehicle sector - where almost identical pick-up trucks and vans are sold and branded by different manufacturers.
Or back in the 1960s where British Motor Corporation sold the Morris 1100 which could be alternatively bought as an identical Austin 1100.
In its basic form platform sharing involves producing different vehicles with an externally unique body style knitted to a shared skeleton underneath.
In the early days this usually meant either a ladder style chassis frame or a common body floor pan but little else, but more recently it has been significantly extended to incorporate suspension systems, electrical architecture, and powertrains (engine and transmission).
The shared architecture within the platform is modular, which allows designers and engineers to work around vehicle hard points, which are non-negotiable.
Instead proven components and systems are inherent in allowing the designers to create a unique style, whilst the engineers ensure vehicle performance targets and levels of perceived quality are met congruent to the brand.
Developing vehicles from a common platform with different ‘top hats’ has been deployed very successfully by Volkswagen across their VW/Audi/Seat/Skoda brands.
So a VW Golf shares the same DNA as a Skoda Octavia beneath the skin, but the vehicle brand perceived hierarchy is protected by differential performance characteristics, perceived quality and price points.
If platform sharing is not applied rigorously the cars can lack an identity or bespoke feel.
Are them some lessons to be learned from the practice - or the lack of it - in the past?
CT: It has to be said that platform sharing in the 海角视频 has had a chequered history.
In the 1960s and 70s British Leyland would have none of it.
So Jaguar, Rover, and Triumph literally purposely shared nothing, their engineering fiefdoms saw to that.
So it is claimed that the engine bay of the 1968 Jaguar XJ was designed to ensure that the Rover V8 engine would not fit, and Triumph needlessly designed their own V8 engine as well. Their renowned engineering head at the time, Spen King, talked of not selling your birth right by building vehicles inferior to the brand exclusivity.
That just led to massive duplication of resources, investment and longer vehicle development times.
Until that is when Jaguar were hived off to Ford in 1990 and attempted a couple of platform shares - with the 1998 Ford Lincoln based S-Type and the 2001 Ford Mondeo based Jaguar X-Type.
But they struggled with the market’s poor perception of Ford based Jaguars and both cars failed to secure their planned sales volumes due to the phenomenon known as brand dilution. Austin Rover had a very good run with their Honda collaboration with the Honda based platforms such as the 1981 Triumph Acclaim (in reality a badge engineered Honda Ballade), 1984 Rover 213 & 216 (Honda Ballade), 1986 Rover 800 (jointly developed platform), and 1989 Rover 214 & 216 (Honda Civic) being well received in the market and sold reasonably well.
Somehow the designers and engineers managed to retain the then still prestigious Rover brand image on these vehicles in the style, choice of materials, and dynamic capability.
However, the collaboration was not always harmonious in the early days and Honda engineers were often exasperated with arrogance from the Austin Rover side.
Eventually it was a reasonably balanced partnership and Austin Rover learned a lot of lessons from the rigorously applied Honda New Product Introduction (NPI) process. So much so that they documented it as a Project Management Policy (PMP) for use on Land Rover vehicle programmes as well.
Although quality was the Achilles heel for Austin Rover and they never managed to hold up to the Honda levels of reliability.
The Austin brand was eventually shown the door, but unfortunately subsequent Honda collaborations such as the 1993 Rover 600 (Honda Accord) and the 1995 Rover 400 (Honda Civic) just seemed to lose the by now diminishing Rover brand image, and were seen as quite frankly boring cars with a bland style.
Land Rover, with their use of ladder frame (body-on-frame) chassis, had amazing success, initially with the 1970 Range Rover based off the Land Rover utility vehicle, and later with the 1989 Discovery, which was essentially a top hat off the Range Rover chassis.
Since then JLR have been working very hard on platform sharing within their own vehicle portfolio.
For example the 2011 Range Rover Evoque was designed off the D8 platform which also spawns the Jaguar E-Pace and Discovery Sport. Although the D8 is in reality a heavily modified evolution of the aged Ford steel EUCD platform which has major weight compromises.
And their ground breaking aluminium D7 platform is used across the range for the Jaguars XE, XF, F-Pace, I-Pace and Land Rovers Discovery 5, Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, and Range Rover Velar.
So JLR have successfully shared platforms within their brands and across Jaguar and Land Rover.
But will the BMW shared platform work, with the inevitable question – is it really a BMW or Jaguar?
How much is the transition to electric vehicles dictating some of the big decisions for car makers?
CT: Manufacturers like JLR are faced with the electric vehicle conundrum, where they must decide whether to develop unique EV platforms or produce gasoline, hybrid, and EV powered cars from a shared modular platform.
Volkswagen are going with an exclusive EV platform known as MEB which will be scalable across much of their vehicle brands, where as JLR are not.
Instead they are engineering a brand new flexible aluminium platform called Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA) that they have developed in-house.
The MLA platform as designed can accommodate fully electric, hybrid, and conventional gasoline engines - and will start with the replacement for the Jaguar XJ, then move onto Range Rover replacements later.
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And they could share smaller vehicle platforms with BMW, which will also accommodate the full range of powertrains.
However, a very complex challenge exists for manufacturers, which is about forecasting the correct planned capacity for electric vehicle demand whilst running down their production of gasoline vehicles.
For companies like JLR getting this wrong will cost them big time.
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This is where the advantage of having a platform that can fully accommodate gasoline and electric variants allows manufacturing flexibility, where they will be able to ramp up and down production volumes of electrified vehicles to suit the market demand.
With the electric only platform the manufacturer is constrained to that market demand.
So, now that JLR are on the electrified future path and seem to have a great opportunity with this BMW collaboration let us hope they can be winners again.