Jaguar Land Rover wants to colonize South Carolina, or at least a few hundred acres of it, for its first-ever U.S. factory.
The U.K.’s Sunday Times reports that the automaker has been “talking to several southern states, including South Carolina” about plans to open a facility that could churn out up to 200,000 cars per year. The Times said the Indian-owned British manufacturer also is considering sites in Mexico but “is thought to be leaning towards the southern states of the U.S.”
While nothing has been confirmed, Jaguar Land Rover is making headway in other markets as it seeks to grow annual worldwide sales to 750,000 by 2020, an increase of 76 percent over last year’s record sales of 425,006. On Tuesday, the first Chinese-built Range Rover Evoque came off the line in Changshu, which aims to produce up to 130,000 Evoque and Land Rover Freelander models annually. Back home, Queen Elizabeth II is scheduled to open a new plant for the company’s Ingenium engines near Wolverhampton next week. These additions come atop JLR’s smaller assembly plants in India, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Turkey. Brazil is slated for 2016. Saudi Arabia is another possible locale.
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Even if JLR becomes neighborly with Mercedes-Benz and BMW in the American South, the majority of JLR’s 200,000 U.S.-built cars would probably be exported. Last year, the company racked up 66,692 U.S. sales, less than half of what Benz and BMW each built here. Granted, there’s a lot of new product: The upcoming Land Rover Discovery Sport and Jaguar XE promise greater volume, as would the Jaguar SUV concept that keeps popping up at auto shows and in test-track spy photos. No doubt the F-type and F-type-based XK successor will make fat profits. Even if there’s a new U.S. plant, we can still expect the majority of JLR’s leather-clad, aluminum-intensive lineup to come from ol’ England.
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via Agya
