Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) plans to create 1,700 jobs at its plant in Solihull as part of a £1.5bn investment
The
concept features some fairly racy lines for a crossover, but the bigger
news lurks under the skin, where the car is built on an all-new
aluminium foundation that will underpin a new line of vehicles slotted
just below the current mid-size XF sedan and (Britain-only) wagon.
Potentially
wearing revived S-Type badging, the first of these new cars, which will
debut globally in 2015 and will arrive in showrooms by 2016, aims to
challenge the German establishment in compact sport luxury. “Our first
ambition is to change the vocabulary from ‘the German three’ to ‘the
European four’”, said Adrian Hallmark, Jaguar’s global director.
Along
with Audi, Jaguar has pioneered the development of aluminium
construction in mass-produced cars. The C-X17 concept marks the debut of
an all-new aluminium platform that – as a clean-sheet design with no
accommodations for existing models or hardware – is flexible enough to
serve as the basis for a wide range of models.
That includes a
rear-drive compact sport sedan or an all-wheel-drive crossover SUV such
as the C-X17 (which, the company underscores, has not yet been
green-lighted for production). Expected vehicles will include
fuel-sipping models that achieve the European benchmark of less than
100g of CO2 emitted per kilometer as well as cars with a top speed of
300kph (186mph).
(An interesting wrinkle is Jaguar’s pledge to use
nearly 100% recycled aluminium in the platform’s construction. That’s a
lot of Heinz baked beans.)
Competing against the Audi A4, BMW 3
Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class is a stern test, so Jaguar will throw
all its know-how at the sport sedan eventually built off of the
platform, said Hallmark. “We are looking at bringing the best
technologies we can.”
The advantages of aluminium will be
reflected by the cars’ sheet metal as well, said design director Ian
Callum. “Aluminium is quite difficult from a design point of view,” he
said. But by building cars with the lightweight metal for 15 years, the
company has learned a bit about stamping and assembling it in complex
shapes. “We know how to get through those challenges in a way that maybe
seven or eight years ago, we didn’t,” Callum said.
As for the
C-X17 and the audacity of building Jaguar’s first crossover, such a
model is strategically important, as Hallmark expects a production model
would appeal to current Jaguar clients.
On 10 September, the
first day of previews in Frankfurt, no one seemed to recoil in horror at
the very notion of a Jaguar crossover SUV. If anything, there is a
pervasive feeling throughout the industry of crossover inevitability;
even Bentley and Lamborghini have gotten into the act in the past year.
Nevertheless, Jaguar is proceeding cautiously. “We have to see if we
have permission to go in this direction,” Callum conceded.
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