Jaguar Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division says it might work its magic on the all-electric Jaguar I-Pace.
SVO boss Michael van der Sande has long wanted to tweak and upgrade the I-Pace and it was widely thought the new flagship model would take inspiration from the I-Pace eTrophy race car. However, van der Sande has since revealed that SVO wasn’t involved in the development of the I-Pace and has, therefore, been delayed in getting its hands on it.
“We got to the I-PACE late,” he told Car Sales in a recent interview. “Normally we like to be at the table in the early platform discussions so we can impact and tech protect for an SVO derivative and, frankly, we were not there so it’s much more difficult to do something with that car in a viable way.”
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Despite this, he said SVO “might still do something with the I-Pace, because that car has a lot of life left in it.”
Van der Sande hasn’t specified precisely what modifications SVO could make to the I-Pace but suggested the electric powertrain opens up a range of possibilities to boost performance.
“Our car will have more power than the underlying core cars, but there’s a bunch of stuff we can do to the powertrain, chassis tuning, and clearly all the other attributes of an SV car,” he explained. “Multi-mode motors, e-diff, torque vectoring, there’s lots of opportunity to tune the car to suit the character of what you want to achieve.”
Powering the flagship I-Pace are two electric motors that combine to deliver 395 hp and 516 lb-ft (700 Nm) of torque. These motors receive their juice from a 90 kWh LG Chem lithium-ion battery.
