Jaguar Land Rover accelerates electrification with new £250 million Future Energy Lab

By Peter Davison

26 October 2023

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Jaguar Land Rover's £250 million Future Energy Lab

Jaguar Land Rover has unveiled its new Future Energy Lab, a £250 million state of the art electric vehicle (EV) test facility, as it prepares to launch nine pure electric luxury models by 2030.

The new 323,000 sq. ft. facility at JLR’s Whitley Engineering Centre in Coventry will host more than £40 million of technological innovations to enable the rapid testing of EVs, including electric test rigs, Electric Drive Unit (EDU) manufacturing and electric vehicle systems test cells.

This includes a series of extreme-weather climate chambers, capable of simulating the harshest of conditions – from -40°C and up to 55°C.

The facility, part of JLR’s £15bn investment to electrify its luxury brands over the next five years, will significantly increase JLR’s test and development capacity.

This will enable the company to sustainably scale up its next generation EVs, reducing the need to transport across other global test facilities during the development process.

By increasing its capacity for testing EVs on-site, JLR is minimising the cost of, and the emissions associated with sending fleets of prototype cars around the world for test assessments.

More than 200 EV engineers are already working at the facility, and a further 150 roles will be created, providing a significant employment boost to the regional economy.

JLR is planning a further £22m worth of investment next year, as it continues to upgrade the Coventry site.

"Our vehicles are, and continue to be, at the forefront of an all-electric automotive future. This facility, a core component of our Reimagine strategy, is essential to providing the advanced testing capabilities that will be vital to the performance and reliability of the modern luxury vehicles we are proudly developing," said Thomas Mueller, executive director of product engineering.

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JLR’s next electric vehicle, the modern luxury Range Rover BEV, is one of the models undergoing hundreds of thousands of hours of testing on these rigs, while its EDUs are designed, developed and tested by JLR engineers based at Whitley. The model is due to launch next year.

The new site represents another milestone in the delivery of JLR’s Reimagine Strategy to ready its industrial footprint for electrification.

By taking the design and development of its own EDUs in-house, JLR says it is assuming greater oversight of its own supply chain, with more flexibility to change its own EDUs.

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.