The Land Rover Defender styles itself as British through and through, but the reinvented icon is actually built exclusively in JLR’s Nitra plant in Slovakia, which is 1,120 miles (1,800 km) from the Indian-owned British company’s HQ.
And now JLR has reiterated its commitment to the Nitra operation by confirming it will build EVs for the company by the end of the decade. Though it didn’t say which electric vehciles will be rolling off the Nitra line, or when they might start rolling, the upcoming Defender EV is a dead-cert, and we know we’ll be seeing it within the next couple of years.
JLR has pledged to launch nine fully electric vehicles by 2030, including half a dozen Range Rover, Discovery and Defender EVs by 2026, and the first of those – and the brand’s first ever EV, in fact – will be a fully-electric Range Rover scheduled for launch in 2024.
Related: Jaguar Confirms 4-Door EV GT With 430 Mile Range And $125K Starting Price For 2025
JLR announced the Nitra EV news while celebrating the fifth anniversary of the plant, which was forced to move from two shifts to three to keep up with demand for the Defender, upping production from 2,000 to 3,000 SUVs per week. In total, more than 365,000 Defenders have been built since production started in 2018, making it JLR’s most popular model for the past two years running, and far more popular than the Discovery, which is also built at Nitra.
And that popularity proves that the company was right to ditch the old Defender, which was much loved, but expensive to build, sold slowly and made a terrible road car. JLR says the new one is generating 10 times as much revenue, and when you’re an automaker, that’s what counts.
The Nitra announcement comes only days after JLR opened a £250 million ($302 m) Future Energy Lab capable of simulating extreme heat and cold environments so that EVs testing can be carried out without the need to ship dozens of prototypes around the world.
