In November last year, Tata Motors announced a collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover to share the latter’s born-electric Electrified Modular Architecture (EMA) for its upcoming Avinya range of vehicles. Jaguar’s new electric platform the Jaguar Electric Architecture (JEA) however would not be used by Tata Motors.
In an interview with Autocar India at the brands headquarters in the UK, Jaguar MD Rawdon Glover said “this platform is dedicated to Jaguar and currently there are no plans to do that (build Tata cars on it)” he elaborated further saying “this platform will only be used for vehicles designed, engineered and built in the UK.” This would mean that the platform would also not be used to build cars in other markets like China, a country where the brand has a local manufacturing presence. The idea of reserving the JEA cars as ‘British-built’ is a good one and would help build the brand’s new high-end positioning.
The JEA platform was developed to support a range of high-end vehicles that Jaguar expects to reposition the brand and move it higher up from the ‘mass-premium’ segment that the current products operate in. Thus, in that sense JEA would be too far out for Tata Motors. The EMA platform on the other hand which was designed to underpin JLR’s next generation mid-sized vehicles would make for a natural fit for Tata Motors higher segment premium range of vehicles.
While the 4-door GT will position the brand in the upper and more luxurious space, there will likely be more affordable models from Jaguar “there will be vehicles that will come after, that may perform a different role and target a wider audience” says Glover. Thus alluding to the fact that more affordable models are on the anvil. These could use both JEA and EMA platforms and would also support vehicles with different body types.
Also see:
New Jaguar Type 00 electric concept walkaround
Jaguar rebrand brief was to ‘think like a start-up’
