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Tata Motors SUVs With Jaguar Land Rover’s Inputs Coming In 2016
Its been five years since Tata Motors acquired the Whitley, Coventry, UK based Jaguar Land Rover. The then struggling iconic automaker was purchased for $2.3 billion. Since then JLR has proved a valuable asset to Tata Motors. The fortunes of the British carmaker has took a turn for the good and has also proved to be the only profitable unit within Tata Motors.
Profitability aside, Tata Motors has until now not utilised its assets in any other significant way. That being, tapping into JLR's vast amounts of knowledge and expertise accumulated over the decades. When JLR was acquired most Indians assumed changes within Tata Motors, in terms of build quality and vehicle technology would be visible soon. That, however, has remained from happening until now.
In fact, it has been revealed, the first strides towards integrating JLR's expertise into Tata Motors have been taken. But the first resulting products, in the form of two Tata Motors SUVs will only come by 2016.
LiveMint has learnt from industry sources that the first of the two SUV will be priced between INR 10-15 lakhs and should hit the market by 2016. Tata Motors is likely to start asking its suppliers for components from the first quarter of 2015.
Inputs from JLR will not come in the form of engines or design. Where these SUVs will gain from JLR will be in the architecture, performance, technologies, body stiffness and suspension front.
Tata Motors will also upgrade the Tata Aria/Strome platform to support its future models. Even here inputs from JLR engineers will be taken. "Next generation SUVs will have a lot of learnings from Land Rover." the report quotes an insider source as saying.
Incorporating JLR's technologies and expertise, however, is limited to large vehicles. This is where the challenge exists for Tata Motors, which has to figure out way to transfer the learnings to build its smaller vehicles.
But 2016 is still a long way off. The company is already losing out to competition, especially from Mahindra. Do you think Tata should push forward to try and bring a JLR engineered budget SUV much sooner?
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