Jaguar Land Rover chief executive Thierry Bollore has confirmed that the brand will look outside the company to find a supplier for Jaguar’s range of all-electric vehicles.
In a bid to secure the long-term future of Jaguar, the British automaker recently confirmed that the brand will only produce electric vehicles from 2025. JLR’s plan is for all future Jaguar models to share a single, common EV architecture but up until now, it was unclear where that platform would come from.
Speaking to financial analysts during an investor day on Friday, Bollore said that it would be expensive for Jaguar to develop the platform in-house as it will remain a low-volume carmaker and likely build fewer than the 103,000 vehicles that it sold last year, Auto News reports.
“Naturally there is massive appetite to work with us,” Bollore told analysts, adding that the brand is talking “with a selection of actors” about using a pre-existing EV platform.
The company’s chief executive also said that the choice of partner and platform will be partly dictated by the designs of future Jaguar models, stating “[the platform] has to respect the proportion of the designs.”
Read More: JLR’s EV Plan For Jaguar Could Make Or Break The Automaker
“Great design begins with volume of proportions and clearly Jaguars will have quite significant different volumes of proportion compared to Land Rovers,” Jaguar Land Rover’s head of design Gerry McGovern confirmed in the investor call. “Therefore, we need to look for opportunities out there in terms of architectures that we could utilize or refine to give the stunning jaw-dropping Jaguars I’m talking about.”
Interestingly, Bollore did say that if Jaguar is unable to find a supplier, it will ultimately have to develop the platform in-house.
“It may be that we develop platform internally, but it has to be design led,” he said. “There is no point doing what we are doing with Jaguar unless these products are drop dead gorgeous.”
