News : Jaguar Land Rover powers up new Ingenium engine family

Jaguar Land Rover's new Ingenium engine

Ingenium, the new family of premium diesel and petrol engines designed, engineered and manufactured by Jaguar Land Rover, delivers class-leading levels of torque, horsepower and refinement while reducing emissions and fuel consumption.

The company yesterday revealed more of the technical details of these new lightweight, compact low-emissions modular engines as it showcased some of the company’s future technologies.

Ingenium: Configurable, Flexible, Modular

Jaguar Land Rover has developed its own new family of advanced technology, low-friction, high-performance petrol and diesel engines to meet growing customer demand for lower fuel consumption and cost of ownership, without compromising performance and the driver experience.

Ingenium’s design brief presented Jaguar Land Rover’s Engineers with a tough and complex challenge – its new engine family would need to be:

  • Configurable and flexible to enable seamless installation in a range of new Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles
  • Scalable up and down to create smaller or larger displacement variants in the future
  • Able to accommodate a range of powertrain layouts including rear-, all- and four-wheel drive
  • Engineered to support manual and automatic transmissions as well as electrified hybrid drive systems
  • Easily accepting of new advances in engine technologies as they become available

Jaguar Land Rover Powertrain Engineers at the company’s Whitley and Gaydon development facilities have based Ingenium’s foundation on extremely strong and compact aluminium blocks for both diesel and petrol versions.

These lightweight blocks share the same bore, stroke, cylinder spacing and 500cc cylinder capacity. This helps give Ingenium the configurability and flexibility around which smaller or larger engines can quickly and efficiently be developed to meet future regulatory and competitive requirements. To support the development of this future powertrain technology, including the new Ingenium family, Jaguar Land Rover has invested £40 million to expand and enhance its Powertrain Engineering facility at its Whitley Technical Centre.

All diesel and petrol Ingenium variants will be equipped with state-of-the-art turbochargers that improve performance, particularly at low speeds, and that help reduce consumption and CO2 emissions.

Ingenium’s modular design enables both petrol and diesel engines to share many common internal components and calibration strategies. This reduces complexity, raises quality and simplifies manufacturing, and allows Jaguar Land Rover to react more quickly to changes in global demand.

‘Customers around the world are increasingly demanding cleaner-running, more efficient vehicles that maintain or even enhance the performance attributes expected of a rugged all-terrain vehicle or a high performance car. Our Ingenium engines deliver this to a new level,” said Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart, Jaguar Land Rover Group Engineering Director.

‘Engineering and manufacturing our own engines improves our ability to react to changes in demand and improves our ability to react to changes in legislation and competitive technologies in the future,” added Dr. Ziebart. ‘We believe that with the range of technologies we are investing in, Jaguar Land Rover can absolutely satisfy the often conflicting requirements of delivering engaging high-performance luxury vehicles that reduce our carbon footprint in the long-term.”

Technology Powerhouse

Ingenium bristles with innovations that will deliver more of what Jaguar Land Rover’s global customers expect from premium high-performance engines: outstanding low-end torque, effortless acceleration and class-leading emissions performance with low consumption.

One strategy Jaguar Land Rover Powertrain Engineers used to accomplish this was a focus on reducing internal friction.

In the first Ingenium engine to go into volume production, a 2.0-litre diesel known as AJ200D, friction is reduced by 17 per cent compared to the current engine, helping to make it one of the most efficient and responsive 2.0-litre turbo diesels in its segment.

Ingenium engines feature six key technologies that combine to reduce friction, add refinement and improve performance. They include:

  • Roller bearings on cam and balancer shafts, instead of machined-in bearing surfaces.
  • Computer-controlled variable oil pumps that save energy by delivering the optimum amount of oil at all speeds, engine loads and temperatures.
  • Computer-controlled variable water pumps that adjust the amount of coolant flowing through the engine, based on temperature, speed and driving conditions. The split or twin circuit cooling system offers the twin benefits of lowering CO2 emissions by enabling fast warm ups, and providing quick cabin heat on cold days.
  • Simplified cam drive system designed for modular application.
  • Crankshafts that are offset from the centre of the block.
  • Electronically controlled piston cooling jets to improve efficiency in the oil pumping circuit. Jets are switched off when piston cooling is not needed. They also enable the engine to reach its optimum operating temperature faster, further helping to reduce CO2 emissions.

All Ingenium engines will be equipped with advanced and efficient turbochargers, central direct high-pressure fuel injection, variable valve timing and start-stop technology.

Ingenium will also come to market as one of the most tested and proven Jaguar Land Rover engines ever. Before the first Ingenium engine is sold, it will have already undergone the equivalent of more than eight years of the toughest, most punishing testing that Jaguar Land Rover engineers could devise. These tests include a huge range of integrity and durability testing, including more than 72,000 hours of dyno testing and 2 million miles of real-world testing to ensure these engines deliver – and continue to deliver.

Key Role in Vehicle Weight Reduction

Jaguar Land Rover already leads the industry in the production of lightweight, aluminium-bodied vehicles. The introduction of Ingenium unites the company’s light-weight chassis expertise with powertrains specifically designed and calibrated to complement reduced weight vehicles.

Jaguar Land Rover engineers are focusing on reducing vehicle weight by optimising every component in every system, powertrains included. Despite adding features and increasing power output, Ingenium engines weigh as much as 80kg less than today’s equivalent engines.

‘Ingenium fulfils our commitment to offer our global customers some of the most advanced powertrains available in some of the lightest vehicles in the premium SUV and performance car segments,” said Ron Lee, Jaguar Land Rover Director of Powertrain Engineering.

‘Being configurable and flexible are the two key strands of Ingenium’s DNA because we have future-proofed our new engines from the outset. Ingenium will be able to accept new advances in fuel, turbocharging, emissions, performance and electrification technologies when they are ready and accessible to be deployed.

‘We were able to design Ingenium in this way because we had the rare opportunity to start the project with a clean sheet of paper. We weren’t locked into any of the usual restrictions that force engineering compromises because we had no existing production machinery that would dictate design parameters, no carryover engine architectures to utilise and no existing factory to modify,” said Lee.

Clive Goldthorp

22 Comments

  1. Very good news and a modular engine design that will create instant cost savings benefits through its modular design and ability to share many key components and assembly practises, regardless of whether petrol, diesel or hybrid.

    Clearly another key area after flexible platform designs which can only add to Jaguar Land Rover’s commercial success. Looking beyond this news, I wonder whether the modular practise will see it eventually being used as the basis for replacing the existing six and eight cylinder petrol and diesel engines?

  2. Plenty of electronic gubbins to potentially go wrong. That’s the way of the world I guess. Hope they prove to be ultra reliable.
    And Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart? That is one cool name!

  3. Revisiting this news story, I guess I am slightly disappointed that the featured engine appears to have cam-belts rather than cam-chains, which would aid in reducing some of the servicing costs when the car is outside of its service warranty. Changing the cam-belts on the TDV6/SDV6 engine found in the Discovery 3 and 4 is hardly a quick, straightforward or cheap job and it usually needs to be done just after the three year warranty and service package have expired.

  4. @Davud 3500 – I agree it’s a swine of a job but really do you believe it’s “usually” done at 3 years old? How many 105,000 mile 3 year old Discoveries have you seen?? For an average driver it’s a once every 8 – 9 year expense and realistically it’ll only ever be done once in the cars life. In terms of the total cost of ownership of one of those tanks over that period it’s pretty trivial. It’s also likely to be a much easier job on an inline engine like this.

    Also it’s not like timing chains are always trouble free.

  5. Hmm. What is the “simplified camdrive system” ? Photo of the engine shows no cam belt covers, so one assumes it is chain driver, but how can one simplify this much ? Maybe a Morse chain with no tensioner ?

  6. Interesting… The engine will cater for “all and 4 wheel drive”.

    How many wheels will future Land Rovers have then???

  7. Herr Doktor Ziebart used to work at BMW, one notable responsibility being the E46 3 Series back in the late ’90s.

    As regards different drive line designs, ignore what’s on the Wikipedia Four Wheel Drive page, here:-

    AWD = A Jag with drive to all four wheels

    4WD = A Land or Range Rover with drive to all four wheels

    • I thought Land Rovers(defender / range rover / discovery) were AWD – some with a centre difflock. 4wd in my book is something that has selectable 2wd or 4wd (ie the common 4wd ute or the Series Land Rovers). alex

    • True, the plan was for there to be 4 and 6 cylinder versions of the TD5, but the BMW M47 and M57 engines were the obvious solutions. Why did BMW approve the TD5? Officially this was because the straight six BMW wouldn’t fit in the Discovery 2, unofficially there were Rover managers who knew they’d be out of a job if they didn’t have their own engine factory.
      No reason why larger and smaller versions of this new engine won’t appear in the future.

      • I met an diesel engineer who worked for Land Rover at the time and he told me the reason the TD5 made it into production was because no BMW engine would pass emissions standards when working in a car as big and heavy as the Discovery.

  8. I cannot think of anything worse than computer governed lubrication . The slightest electronic problem will be liable to result in serious engine damage . Further, this fad for putting the cam drive at the back end of the engine is a potentially expensive problem for the future – ask those with BMW 320d engines, or if your memories go back far enough, the Morris Six / Wolseley 6/80

    • Better control of the lubrication will be all about reducing the power required to drive the oil pump, especially at lower engine speeds. No detail is available on how it works, but chances are a loss of electronic control will default to full flow.

      I believe the main reason for the rear cam drives on North-South engines is to give more engine to bonnet clearance for the European pedestrian impact regulation.

  9. Nice to see they followed Triumph with the Desaxe configuration of the crankshaft (offset) what may concern me is the chain drive once the car is disposed of in the second hand market and service intervals that are way too long no matter how good an engine is or how good the oil.

    A good indicator of this is three and four pot Corsa’s rattling away and a lot of VAG TSi’s with jumped chains.

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