JLR invests £500 million in its Halewood factory

Jaguar Land Rover is getting its 61-year-old factory in Halewood near Liverpool ready for EV production. Here, the carmaker will manufacture mid-size electric SUVs based on the new Electric Modular Architecture (EMA) platform.

The first half of the £500 million investment (€600 million) has already been used to modernize production lines and machinery, train staff, and develop digital technology.

A further £250 million will be invested in the coming years to produce plug-in hybrids and pure combustion engines in Halewood alongside electric cars for a transitional period before the site becomes a pure electric car factory.

Expansion

As part of the investment program, the site in Halewood was expanded by over 32,000 m2. The length of the final production line was increased from 4 to 6 kilometers to allow batteries to be installed in the vehicles.

The historic factory – it started building the Ford Anglia in 1963 – has been equipped with modern technology, including 750 autonomous robots, ADAS calibration equipment, laser alignment technology “for perfect parts fitment,” and cloud-based digital management systems to monitor production, creating what JLR describes as a “factory of the future.”

“Halewood has been the heart and soul of JLR in the Northwest of England for well over two decades, producing vehicles such as the Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport,” said Barbara Bergmeier, Executive Director of Industrial Operations at JLR.

“Halewood will be our first all‑electric production facility, and it is a testament to the brilliant efforts by our teams and suppliers who have worked together to equip the plant with the technology needed to deliver our world-class luxury electric vehicles.”

Re-skilling people

As part of JLR’s Future Skills Programme, the company invests £20 million (€24 million) annually across all its sites to enable employees to pivot their careers and gain vital skills in new systems, technologies, and processes central to the future of automotive manufacturing and engineering.

Within this, JLR is opening Halewood’s new training and development center, where employees will train on vehicles at varying stages of the production cycle. The critical focus is High-Voltage Training (HVT), which involves battery assembly processes. One thousand six hundred employees have already completed HVT, and another one hundred are to be trained.

Reimagining the future, once again

This investment is part of JLR’s commitment to its Reimagine strategy. It will see JLR electrify all of its brands by 2030 and become carbon neutral across its supply chain, products, and operations by 2039, significantly later than the carmaker initially planned.

In February 2024, JLR announced that it is moving away from its goal of launching six all-electric cars by 2026 and will instead focus on hybrids and plug-in hybrids, as the demand for battery-electric cars has slowed down.