• Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) announced an investment of £250 million into a state-of-the-art electric vehicle test facility on Wednesday.
• The facility will help JLR test its EVs more rapidly and efficiently.
• The facility will see JLR bolster its staffing compliment at the Whitley Engineering Centre in Coventry.

The world is slowly warming to the idea of electric vehicles. More and more vehicle manufacturers are dipping their toes into the sector and in 2022, 14 percent of all new cars sold were electric according to the International Energy Agency.

On Wednesday morning, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) announced an investment of £250 million into a state-of-the-art electric vehicle test facility. The facility will cover over 30 000 square metres at JLR’s Whitley Engineering Centre in Coventry in the UK and will help the manufacturer test electric vehicles more rapidly. One highlighted feature of the facility is that it will include extreme-weather climate chambers for vehicles capable of simulating temperatures between -40°C and up to 55°C.

This £250 million investment forms part of the vehicle maker’s broader £15 billion investment into electrifying all of its luxury brands over the next five years. The manufacturer notes that it’s preparing to launch nine pure electric luxury vehicles by 2030.

“Our operations at Whitley are at the heart of JLR – itself a leading business in the local community – so this test facility is another jewel in the crown of our move towards an all-electric future. This is a notable investment for the business and local economy,” says Oliver Boakes, chief engineer, power train operations at JLR said in a statement.

On the note of the local Whitley economy, JLR is looking to add 150 more staff to the facility which already boasts a workforce of 200 EV engineers. By building this testing facility, JLR says it will be able to optimise its production line which means vehicles don’t need to be shipped to another location in order to be tested.

One of the cars being tested is the Range Rover BEV. JLR says the vehicle is undergoing hundreds of thousands of hours of testing on equipment similar to what will be used at the new facility. This all-electric Range Rover is expected to arrive some time in 2024.

JLR has been in the EV space for a while already, our time with the Jaguar I-PACE earlier this year was enough to impress us. Given the quality of that vehicle, it makes sense that the firm is taking its time to hone the product, especially for the luxury market.

With that having been said, it may want to act fast. According to the IEA report mentioned earlier, EV sales are set to climb 35 percent year-on-year by the time we say goodbye to 2023.

An EV is a bit of a hard-sell in South Africa given the ongoing uncertainty that is coupled with loadshedding. In India and Indonesia however, EVs accounted for 1.5 percent of all total vehicle sales in 2022 while in Thailand, three percent of all vehicles sold were EVs.