Tata, JLR to begin a Joint engine development program

The Tata Motors India and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), British auto makers, are planning to have a joint development program for engine manufacturing according to Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors. This integration is to further strengthen their collaboration and hope to set up more manufacturing plants in India as well as UK. They are also weighing the options for setting up an assembly plant in China, the world’s largest emerging auto market.

The Tata Motors India and the JLR together have plans to form an extensive development program to manufacture cars, off-road vehicles and commercial vehicles both with regular fuel as well as in alternate fuel engines. They also intend to build electric and hybrid vehicle to meet the fuel efficiency and low emission requirements. Apparently, the Indian operations are going to be conducted in Jaguar Land Rover’s new manufacturing plant expected to set up in India first, followed by a similar facility in UK as well.

They believe that developing in-house engines and engine sharing programs will help to improve the economies and the jointly developed engines will be used in the superior Tata products and the new compact entry-level JLR products. The jointly developed engines are expected to be 4-cylinder, 2 litre engines.

Paul Chadderton of Jaguar Land Rover has asserted that they have huge plans laid out ahead and intend to invest about 400 million pounds as an initial funding for the new engine plant.

The JLR imports all its engines currently from the Ford, the trend which is going to change once the UK and India plants are up and functioning, after which they would need only the engines above 2 litre capacity to be bought from the Ford.  The new India and the UK plants functioning together have a combined production capacity of half a million units.