JLR has announced a £500 million investment to transform its historic Halewood facility on Merseyside to support the parallel production of electric vehicles alongside existing combustion and hybrid models.
Originally built in 1963 to produce the Ford Anglia, Halewood is being transformed for the electric era.
With £250m already invested, the transformation so far has involved over one million hours of construction work over the last 12 months. The site has been extended by 32,364 sqm to produce JLR’s medium‑sized electric luxury SUVs on the new Electric Modular Architecture (EMA) platform.
The historic plant has been fitted with technology including new EV build lines, 750 autonomous robots, ADAS calibration rigs, laser alignment technology for perfect part fitment and the latest cloud based digital plant management systems to oversee production, creating the ‘factory of the future’.
This investment is part of JLR’s commitment to its Reimagine strategy, which will see JLR electrify all its brands by 2030, with the aim of achieving carbon net zero across our supply chain, products and operations by 2039.
Electrification is central to this strategy and Halewood has an exciting future producing ICE, PHEV and BEV models side by side before eventually becoming JLR’s first all‑electric production facility.
Halewood has been the heart and soul of JLR in the Northwest of England for well over two decades, producing vehicles such as the Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport.
“Halewood will be our first all‑electric production facility, and it is a testament to the brilliant efforts by our teams and suppliers who have worked together to equip the plant with the technology needed to deliver our world class luxury electric vehicles,” said Barbara Bergmeier, executive director, industrial operations at JLR.
As part of JLR’s Future Skills Programme, the company is investing £20m each year across all of its sites to enable employees to pivot their careers and gain vital skills in new systems, technologies and processes central to the future of automotive manufacturing and engineering.
Within this, JLR is opening of Halewood’s new training and development centre, where colleagues will train on vehicles at varying stages of the production cycle, with a key focus on High Voltage Training (HVT) involving battery assembly processes.
1,600 employees have completed HVT with a further one hundred employees to be trained, the company says.