Jaguar Land Rover has announced that, from 2020, all new Jaguar Land Rover vehicles will be electrified.
According to Jaguar Land Rover, every new model line will be electrified from 2020, giving the customers even more choice.
Dr Ralf Speth, Jaguar Land Rover chief executive officer, said: “We will introduce a portfolio of electrified products across our model range, embracing fully electric, plug-in hybrid and mild hybrid vehicles. Our first fully electric performance SUV, the Jaguar I-PACE, goes on sale next year.”
With I-PACE Jaguar started with a clean sheet and engineered a bespoke, tailored, pure electric SUV from the ground up, creating a beautiful design with everyday practicality. It’s a performance SUV, it looks stunning, is great to drive and will be on sale next year.
But Jaguar is thinking ahead. The FUTURE-TYPE is a vision for the car of 2040 and beyond. The fully autonomous virtual concept explores mobility for the connected world of tomorrow, where vehicles could be shared not owned.
According to Jaguar, at the car’s heart is Sayer – an intelligent steering wheel that will be able to carry out hundreds of tasks. The advanced speech recognition software will allow it to answer questions, connect the driver to the news.
Jaguar has announced that the company is already testing driverless cars in the real world. The Autonomous Urban Drive technology can enable a vehicle to operate without a driver through a city, obeying traffic lights as well as negotiating T-junctions and roundabouts.
Designed and developed in the UK, this research technology is already in use in a Range Rover Sport and takes us a step closer to achieving level four autonomy in Jaguar Land Rover’s future vehicles within the next decade.
Jaguar’s plan to electrify all new cars from 2020 might have been a reaction to the Scottish Governments announcement ‘to phase out the need for petrol and diesel vehicles by 2032’ which is eight years earlier than the UK and France targets to ban sales of new cars with internal combustion engines.
Electric shift accelerates
JLR is not the only car brand with big plans for electric vehicles. Following their announcement, German automaker BMW announced that it too would be making a massive expansion into this market.
While not going as far as JLR to phase out gasoline-only engines entirely, BMW announced that it would offer 12 all-electric models and 13 hybrid versions by the year 2025.
Moreover, by 2020 all BMW models would have an equivalent electrified version which a consumer would be able to choose, with an electric Mini set to be released in 2019.
“The trend towards electric mobility is irreversible. But it will happen in different ways and at various speeds in different parts of the world,” said BMW board member Klaus Fröhlich in a statement.
“Our customers will be able to choose between super-efficient, super-clean combustion engines, plug-in hybrids, and all-electric battery-powered vehicles.”
In addition, Swedish car maker Volvo announced in June that it would build only electric and hybrid cars from 2019, describing its own announcement as “one of the most significant moves by any car maker to embrace electrification”.
