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Jaguar and Land Rover Angle For Production In China
First time accepted submitter ourlovecanlastforeve writes "Those of you still hanging on to Jaguar and Land Rover as the last vestiges of the truly British automobile in the States may find yourselves grasping at straws as Chery announces a nearly two billion dollar joint effort with the auto brand to move production to Changsu in China." Anyone still hanging on to that idea might also be interested to learn that Jaguar and Land Rover are subsidiaries of India's Tata, maker of the low-priced Nano.
My opinion,this is how it breaks down:
Jaguar - the name means high maintainence! Or Land Rover, the name means shit fuel economy!
Really it'll be great.
Owned by Indians, built by Chinese, bought by Americans and marketed as British.
This must be the epitome of globalization.
I've certainly heard of people who seek cars made in a certain country, but does anyone actually value this more than whether their car is a piece of shit?
In any event, reducing the auto industry in certain countries may help to discourage auto-friendly subsidies and allow competing industries to emerge.
I, for one, am ready for my self-driving vehicle (and I don't care where it's made).
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
For some reason, it still blows my mind that it can be cheaper to manufacture a vehicle and then transport it halfway across the world than it could be to manufacture the vehicle locally.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
The linked blog article reports roughly 20% of the full story. In actual fact, the UK factories are maxed out and employing more and more people, and only production destined for the Chinese market is being moved to China as part of this joint venture.
http://www.toomanycars.info/CarRelationship/Auto%20Family%20Tree%202008-Layout2.png
^This graphic is many years out of date, but it'll give you an idea of the complicated relationships that car manufacturers have.
When it comes down to it, the car companies that aren't partially owned by one another are all cross licensing technology and sharing engines or chassises with one another.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
For some reason, it still blows my mind that it can be cheaper to manufacture a vehicle and then transport it halfway across the world than it could be to manufacture the vehicle locally.
I'd tend to agree with you, but then we would overestimate the real-world cost of transportation. If transport halfway across the globe is feasible for oil, bananas & cheap plastic toys, why would it not be feasible for high-tech products like electronics, cars etc?
Labor cost is what counts. Relative to that, transport is cheap.
Tata Motors is a subsidiary of the Tata group. The latter is worth at least USD100B which makes it larger than BMW. The former and its subsidiaries also make everything from lorries, buses, and heavy lifting equipment to a number of other road cars besides the Nano. The Nano is in many ways considered a relative failure in India and it's their other cars which are more popular.
While export might be a possibility, the article clearly mentions that the Chinese domestic market alone demands 40000 imported JLR models which will very likely increase dramatically when they are produced locally and sold with cheaper price tags. A little googling would have also revealed that China is fast becoming the company's largest market and that JLR is expanding its factories in England and hiring more people.
If anybody needed an example of FUD, the OP would be an apt candidate.
Quillem : An India-centric mishmash of things.
Probably Vietnam next actually. Vietnam is becoming to China what China is to the US.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Sad to see many posters trotting out old reliability myths.
Jaguar have topped JD Power Satisfaction rankings, and many other rankings, on and off for years now. The unreliable ones you're talking about were made in the 70s and 80s by, effectively, British Leyland.
Things looked up in the early 90s when Ford took over. They started bringing modernised toolsets to the construction process, and as a result reliability started climbing. It has continued climbing until it is now well ahead of <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mercedes%20reliability&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8">Mercedes</a>, for example, which is trotted out often as some form of reliability paragon.
It takes a long time to change reputation, that's the problem. That reputation didn't match reality as of about 1995 onwards (possibly slightly earlier) with the dumping of the XJ40 and the move to the X300 design (still marketed as XJ6/XJ8), but people still trot out what they once heard in a bar or from their dad. It's annoying - drop it. Jaguars are as reliable, if not more so, as anything else in their class.
Personally I've owned XJ40 and X300-type XJ6 cars (one a Sovereign, one an XJR). I've owned an X-Type and an S-Type, and am currently contemplating an older XF. During the same time period a friend of mine has owned BMWs and Audis - we've spent about the same on garage bills (an RS8 being a notable exception - bills dwarfed anything I'd seen on the Jags). The X and the S were fine, the XJ40 electrically temperamental, the X300 (XJR) was just superb.
Cheers,
Ian
JLR is actually doing rather well at the moment. The vehicles are UK designed, and JLR is taking on large numbers of staff in the UK to do more design work. I know several ex-colleagues who went to work there.
It is because of the growing Chinese market, that some assembly of vehicles will be added in China, not due to the costs in the UK.
Now that British/American style management has been removed from JLR, there is much better long term planning, and much stronger investment in the product line.
If I was working for JLR, I'd much happily work under Indian management, rather than the mediocre bean-counting 'business degree' incompetents, who ran all of the indigineous British car industry into the ground.
Of course, matters are even worse in the United States. The US car companies still have this type of management, and are completely bankrupt hulks, with terrible product lines. I am shocked, on every visit to the United States, just how bad their vehicles are.
Or does this stupid sentence mean something else stupid?
It's not the sentence that's stupid, just the ignorant reader that's stupid. TVR is still a "British company" (though owned by a Russian). But TVR doesn't sell in the US. The US has restrictive rules designed to be barriers to entry, so the US doesn't get many low-run models, and there are still some specialty UK makers that are available in the UK, or abroad in locations more open to specialty cars.
So this, being explicitly a US site, is discussing the US effects of this, not the UK (or world) effects. When the summaries explicitly state US-only, people complain, when they don't remind everyone this is a US site, then people complain. Either way, people complain. But only the morons.
Learn to love Alaska
I was shopping for a car last night, and while reading stickers was struck that the Honda Pilot actually has more domestic parts than the Dodge Durango, and not by a little bit. I knew that this was at least potentially true, but was really struck when I saw it on the label.
I don't really care who owns the company, because they're just fat cats (and can starve for all I care.) I care who actually gets the middle class jobs involved in auto manufacturing.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Good luck going to war against China.
Somehow I don't think that if Britain went to war with China the inability to build landrovers would be the deciding factor.
You wouldn't be caught dead in Landrover, well unless you're a poser. Now, get a fully loaded Toyota Land CRUISER, then we're talking.
My vote goes to Morgan Motor Company:
The Morgan Motor Company is a British motor car manufacturer. The company was founded in 1910 by Harry Frederick Stanley Morgan, generally known as "HFS" and was run by him until he died, aged 77, in 1959.[1] Peter Morgan, son of H.F.S., ran the company until a few years before his death in 2003. The company is currently run by Charles Morgan, the son of Peter Morgan.
Morgan is based in Malvern Link, an area of Malvern, Worcestershire and employs 163 people. Morgan produced 640 cars in 2007. All the cars are assembled by hand. The waiting list for a car is approximately one to two years, although it has been as high as ten years in the past.
There is also Bristol, although it sounds like they aren't building cars at the moment:
Bristol Cars is a manufacturer of hand-built luxury cars headquartered in Patchway, near Bristol, United Kingdom. Bristol have always been a low-volume manufacturer; the most recent published official production figures were for 1982, which stated that 104 cars were produced in that year. While no official figures have been produced since then it is believed[by whom?] that in recent years production has been around 20 cars per annum.
Unlike most speciality automakers, Bristol does not court publicity and has only one showroom, located on Kensington High Street in London. Nevertheless the company maintains an enthusiastic and loyal clientele.
The company suspended manufacturing in March 2011, when administrators were appointed and 22 staff were made redundant. In April 2011, the company was purchased by the Kamkorp Group.
TVR was very British up until they stopped production... Jaguar and Land Rover rank a lot lower on the British scale to this car guy.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law