Jaguar Land Rover is still trying to restart after last year a hacker intrusion caused a blackout that paralyzed all plants from Great Britain to India, up to the Chinese hubs, cascading also to suppliers with the need for the main British automaker to ask the government of Her Majesty for help as guarantor to cope with the consequent shock in the accounts.
Accounts that were not good even before: last July the British brand, long in the portfolio of the Indian Tata, had announced the need to lay off 500 employees in the UK. Perhaps these difficulties also lie behind the certainly unexpected decision to sign “a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to evaluate collaboration opportunities in product development in the United States” with Stellantis.
FINALLY A PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN EUROPEAN AUTOMAKERS?
Indeed, the historic inability of European manufacturers to unite, in addition to the fact that they are all very battered, has recently led to the hypothesis of mainly countless partnerships between Western automakers and those (full of capital to invest) Chinese ones, and this unprecedented (at the moment also futuristic, since there is nothing definitive or binding) collaboration between Stellantis and Jaguar Land Rover today has surprised even the most attentive and experienced observers.
WHAT COULD STELLANTIS AND JAGUAR LAND ROVER DO TOGETHER
According to the official statements, the two Old Continent companies intend to evaluate “possible synergies in product and technology development, leveraging the complementary expertise of each company to create value for both organizations.”
All this with a very specific geographic focus, the USA which, as is known, have become a more difficult market to penetrate for Europeans under Donald Trump. But here the Italian-French Group can leverage the network of plants and after-sales service it has thanks to its American brands.
Both parties have so far been lukewarm about the opportunities offered by electrification of the range (as anticipated last summer by the British newspaper The Guardian Jaguar Land Rover postponed two of its battery models to this year and anyway plans to achieve carbon neutrality along the entire value chain only by 2039), so it is unlikely that the alliance will aim to accelerate the development of electric cars.
After all, for that segment Stellantis mainly looks to China. And it should not be forgotten, anyway, that in Trump’s USA there is not much enthusiasm for new powertrains, especially now that the new White House occupant has shredded the subsidies wanted by his predecessor to support sales.
