Jaguar Land Rover opens door to building cars in America

Yahoo

15-05-2025

The boss of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has refused to rule out producing cars in America in an effort to avoid tariffs.
Adrian Mardell, JLR's chief executive, said the company had no plans to move production across the Atlantic but could not dismiss the possibility for the future amid lingering questions about how the UK-US trade pact will work in practice.
He said: 'We had and currently have no cause to build cars in the US at this time, but we cannot discount that it could be the case at some point.'
His remarks will ring alarm bells in Whitehall as officials scramble to hammer out the practical details of the trade agreement announced by Donald Trump and Sir Keir Starmer last week.
Mr Mardell, who sat next to the Prime Minister as he received a phone call from Mr Trump at JLR's head office last week, has welcomed the deal and says it will help to protect jobs.
JLR currently makes its best-selling Range Rovers in Solihull, West Midlands, while models such as the Land Rover Discovery and Defender are made in Europe.
The company was facing tariffs of up to 27.5pc on cars shipped from the UK and Europe to the US, but the trade deal means that will fall to 10pc for the first 100,000 vehicles exported by manufacturers in the UK.
Following the announcement, JLR resumed shipments to the US after pausing them previously.
Yet carmakers are still awaiting key details of the pact and JLR's luxury rival Bentley warned on Tuesday that the uncertainty is putting customers off from making purchases.
Frank-Steffen Walliser, the chief executive of Bentley, told a Financial Times conference: 'The worst thing that can happen to a running business is the announcement of lower tariff.
'It means all your customers say 'I won't buy a car now', especially our customers, our clients don't need a car at the moment.
'It is super hard on the business at the moment, nobody's moving.'
For example, he added, it was not clear how the tariff-free quota of 100,000 cars would apply to different carmakers.
'Is the 100,000 for Bentley? I can live with that,' he said. '[But] I assume our colleagues from JLR would also like to have a chunk.'
In the year to the end of March, JLR sold 129,000 cars in North America – representing about one third of its global sales. The company does not break down this figure but the vast majority would have been sold in the US.
Bentley, which sells around 4,000 cars per year in the Americas, similarly counts the US as its biggest market.
So far, Mr Walliser said the company had avoided having to put prices up because it had pre-emptively sped up shipments to the US before tariffs were imposed.
But he warned that strategy was running out of road, as the company's inventories dwindled, and said car makers needed urgent clarity.
'Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining,' he said of the trade deal. 'But it is not operational.'
Last week, Sir Keir insisted that the UK-US deal 'delivers for British business and British workers protecting thousands of British jobs in key sectors including car manufacturing and steel'.
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