Jaguar Land Rover appears to be planning a joint engine-development programme with its Indian parent company Tata Motors.
A new engine co-developed with Tata would solve the problem of how to power JLR products (at least the more humbly engined ones) if its supply of engines from Ford and PSA Peugeot-Citroen dries up.
We reported a few months back that JLR could be setting up all-new engine plants in India and Wolverhampton for an all-new modular range of four-cylinder engines of up to 2.0 litres, but the fact that this could also including building engines for Tata-badged products puts extra weight behind the news.
Will we see this with the engine...
Jaguar and Land Rover sold 62,090 cars for the 2010-2011 and, while that's up nine per cent on the previous year, it's probably still not enough to create the volumes that would be necessary to justify a built-from-scratch engine range. The Tata project would change that.
"To optimize the synergistic strengths between JLR and Tata Motors in India, an examination is also under way on a joint engine development program which would have manufacturing facilities both in the U.K. and India," said Tata boss Ratan Tata in a statement released in the company's annual report
...from this? Er, probably not...
We must say that the idea of a JLR with truly independent drivetrains is almost certainly a good thing. Provided that the engine for the next XF doesn't come from a
Tata Nano
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