OK JLR did spend a lot of money building new efficient clean(er) diesels, when just down the road the Govt. vilified them.

Brexit has made exporting (which JLR does rather well) uncertain.

But surely the fault lies with JLR for producing unreliable, expensive crap and treating customers like

You cannot regularly come bottom or near the bottom of reliability surveys and still expect the customers through the door.
When you do find a mug with rose tinted spectacles with enough money to buy one of your poorly developed products, treating them like criminals (it's the way you drive the car sire), and denying all responsibility for the underlying faults (still sore about the AdBlue) is not going to win repeat custom, or custom from anyone else who knows the customer you have just insulted.

So no for me the fault lies firmly at JLR managements door.

PS my next car will also be a LR if they are still trading, because as a UK Engineer I believe that we can make good vehicles, if only we are allowed to do our respective jobs to the best of our ability. Tangiers Orange - gone, missing her
Replaced by Ewok what a mistake - now a happy Disco Sport owner

Quite so, Sir!! I've decided to stop being a good example and will now just be a terrible warning.....
2008 TD4HSE - gone but much loved.
2014MY SD4 Metropolis - very much loved.

Seems like more of the scare mongering headline grabbing journalism that we seem so fond of in the UK, having worked in the automotive sector for so long I find much of it belittling.

Analysts are pencilling in up to 5,000 roles that may be lost, as the business is forced to take an axe to its workforce in order to survive.

Not to suggest that analysts are wrong about job cuts, but very few of the headlines I've seen in the last 48hours have stressed that this is a made up number based, at best, on an educated guess.

Regular finger pointing at the 'white elephant' i54 engine manufacturing plant which has, according to some poorly informed journalists, been setup only to make diesel engines. Except it hasn't. The Ingenium engine uses the same base engine for both petrol and diesel, switching production from mainly diesel to mainly petrol engines is, i'm told by people who work there, relatively straight forward.

A quick google or trip to Autocar will show you that JLR actually have quite a few new vehicles and desirable power train variants coming out in the next couple of years, their development spend nearly finished. Have no doubt that you spend a lot of money designing a car before you fill the piggy bank back up, budgets are no doubt tight, but I'd say JLR are in a pretty good position for the future.

Yeah, Brexit will make things a bit tricky, but the automotive sector in the UK already do a majority of their sales outside the EU. That wont change. They also get a surprising amount of parts from outside the EU. Cost of European source parts will increase, whole vehicle manufacturing cost will increase, profit per car may drop if it can't be offset against purchase price. But if you can afford to pay £15,000 more for an Evoque over a Freelander2 (yeah I'm going back 5 years . . ) then a few £k more on the purchase price might not be an issue?


UK automotive sector is in a good place, if a bit precarious. Maybe I'm clutching at straws?



EDIT - I think Andy131 makes a good point about quality!

Andy131 wrote:

OK JLR did spend a lot of money building new efficient clean(er) diesels, when just down the road the Govt. vilified them.

Brexit has made exporting (which JLR does rather well) uncertain.

But surely the fault lies with JLR for producing unreliable, expensive crap and treating customers like

You cannot regularly come bottom or near the bottom of reliability surveys and still expect the customers through the door.
When you do find a mug with rose tinted spectacles with enough money to buy one of your poorly developed products, treating them like criminals (it's the way you drive the car sire), and denying all responsibility for the underlying faults (still sore about the AdBlue) is not going to win repeat custom, or custom from anyone else who knows the customer you have just insulted.

So no for me the fault lies firmly at JLR managements door.

PS my next car will also be a LR if they are still trading, because as a UK Engineer I believe that we can make good vehicles, if only we are allowed to do our respective jobs to the best of our ability.

Spot on

I’m on my 10th LR product and this one is by far the worst I’ve had in terms of dealer visits. I don’t mind having problems but LR just couldn’t give a S t and would rather bury their heads in the sand. My Velar will be a year old next month and I’ve still not got the car I’m paying for.

There’s no way I can justify putting more money into LRs pockets if this is the muck that they throw out the factories and not support the customer when things go wrong. Truly shocking. My next car will no doubt be the Volvo XC60. 21MY Defender 90 S 3.0 D200

Think I'd always take the view that if a company isn't doing as well as it was then the directors of the company have probably made some errors. To blame outside influences is just distraction technique. Little in business isn't foreseeable..but some people can't always see what's coming and react accordingly.

As others have said JLR products are expensive, as a result niche, not wholly well built or reliable and not blessed with the best dealers either. For me, after having LRs since 2005 every couple of years I'm on my last. The lenses have fallen out of my rose tinted glasses.

I wish them a speedy recovery.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the them previously having several distinct model lines which appealed to many different segments of the market and varied in price accordingly as well, where as now they have several similar looking model lines which appeal to a narrow spectrum of people and are all pretty expensive. 
Hung like Einstein, smart as a horse.

It seems to my narrow minded uneducated self that JLR have been mismanaged and spread themselves too thin with very similar models.
CEO's jumping up and down blaming BrExit is an easy way out when it is obvious that the whole automotive sector is flooded. If it wasn't so bad it'd be funny.

🐑
Freelander 2 HSE auto 2014 ( Florrie ) ..... Try again.
Freelander 2 GS 2012...... Gone.

I’ve owned 6 LR’s over the last 7 1/2 years, clocking up somewhere around 280,000 miles between them and while they’ve had some fairly unwelcome issues, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot worse from several other manufacturers. It’s certainly not their build quality (apart from the Ingenium engine) that would stop me from buying another.

But, for the very high prices being asked, the new designs need to be considerably better than cars like the DS, the new Evoque or the D5.

I don’t want to get into the Brexit thing here, but I’ve certainly not heard of a single motor manufacturer who thinks it’s a good idea.

Analysts today do not use facts to produce their analysis, it more a case of rumour that fits their political stance or what they wish to happen, it's more a case of fake news with what they hope will come across as a future fact. Laura Kuessnberg is probably a very good example , non of her analysis has come to be fact, either with Corbyn or May, though she keeps trying, sooner than later she will be promoted to a back office.
Regarding LR their mistake was having produced the Ewok and it's success they then decided the world wanted Ewoks some bigger some smaller, the Ewok and its larger clones should have been left in the RR range and the Discovery's more in keeping with their traditional products, rugged looking luxury vehicles that sheep, calves and your Great Danes can ride in comfort, in other words a utility vehicle.
The other day I came across the Top Gear Magazine on the launch of the D5, a basic precis was you can sell a car that's unreliable but competent and looks the part, but to sell a car that looks , no matter how good or competent and reliable is impossible  my PC is slightly to the right of Genghis
2012 HSE SD4 In Orkney Grey now gone, best car ever.

as I said to the wife three years ago "that's me leaving Landrover and going to Volvo after 15 years of Landrover ownership............ this will be their downfall."

but looking at the bigger picture now, I may have been right.

Iain

I wonder how the dealers are taking this? I use Yeovil and Bournemouth and both have had huge rebuilding projects costing £millions and I recently drove past the one in Canterbury and that looks like a building site with new steel work going up. I wonder what JLR has told them to keep them onside and persuade them to invest like this? 3 x FL1 2 manual + 1 auto
5 x FL2 4 manual + 1 auto
Now Discovery Sport P250 MHEV SE

dorsetfreelander: The dealers may not be selling as many but there are plenty of the later vehicles requiring warranty work to keep them busy for a couple of years.

Meanwhile I'll just keep my FL2 going for as along as possible as I simply have no reason to change it at the moment. Jules

dorsetfreelander wrote:

I wonder how the dealers are taking this? I use Yeovil and Bournemouth and both have had huge rebuilding projects costing £millions and I recently drove past the one in Canterbury and that looks like a building site with new steel work going up. I wonder what JLR has told them to keep them onside and persuade them to invest like this?

dorsetfreelander wrote:

I wonder how the dealers are taking this? I use Yeovil and Bournemouth and both have had huge rebuilding projects costing £millions and I recently drove past the one in Canterbury and that looks like a building site with new steel work going up. I wonder what JLR has told them to keep them onside and persuade them to invest like this?

tenet wrote:

dorsetfreelander wrote:

I wonder how the dealers are taking this? I use Yeovil and Bournemouth and both have had huge rebuilding projects costing £millions and I recently drove past the one in Canterbury and that looks like a building site with new steel work going up. I wonder what JLR has told them to keep them onside and persuade them to invest like this?

Is it not more a question of LR saying "if you want to continue selling our cars this is what you need to do". Perhaps the reason for a lot of independents moving to different marques with the big boys (Listers et al) taking all the prestige dealerships.