Jaguar Land Rover does actually seem committed to pursuing an American assembly plant, despite recent reports, but any official announcement is years away.
In case you’re keeping track of the will-they-won’t-they of JLR’s Stateside plans, CEO Ralf Speth told Automotive News Saturday the company would make a decision on a U.S. plant in three years. Part of the reason stems from JLR already busy opening new facilities in China and Brazil.
But the bigger reasion, according to Speth, is that JLR needs to sell 30,000 to 40,000 of one of its products in the U.S. to make a plant viable. The best-selling Range Rover Sport does about half of that goal right now. JLR’s upcoming products are volume ones, however, in the form of the Discovery Sport and XE sedan.
Those lower-priced models are aimed at boosting the company’s overall volume well past the 500,000 mark, even at the risk of overall profitability. But the Discovery Sport isn’t landing on these shores for a few more months and the XE is about another year off. And, if they happen at all, U.S.-made Jaguars and Land Rovers are even further off than that.
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