News : JLR to locate Special Vehicle Operations Technical Centre at Ryton

JLR's SVO Technical Centre, Ryton nr. Coventry

Jaguar Land Rover has today announced that the company’s new Special Vehicle Operations Technical Centre will be located at Prologis Park, Ryton, near Coventry. The facility will be Jaguar Land Rover’s global centre of excellence for the creation of high-end luxury bespoke commissions and extreme performance vehicles. With operations set to begin towards the end of the year, a team of 150 Jaguar Land Rover specialists will be based at Ryton. Some 100 of those highly-skilled engineering and technician jobs will be new. £20 million will be invested in installing specialist equipment and a customer commissioning suite.

The Technical Centre will be part of the company’s Special Operations, created in June under the leadership of John Edwards to focus on meeting the increasing expectations of today’s most discerning and enthusiastic Jaguar and Land Rover customers. Its unique facilities will feature a VIP customer commissioning suite for bespoke services and premium vehicle personalisation, as well as Formula 1-inspired flexible workshops and a specialist paint studio.

The Managing Director of Jaguar Land Rover Special Operations, John Edwards, commented‘We are excited by the capability and potential that this new facility will give us. We will be creating truly iconic vehicles that reinforce the global reputation of both Jaguar and Land Rover brands as we expand our product portfolio and fulfil our ambitious plans.”

A Jaguar Land Rover Special Operations team of 150 specialists will be based at Oxford Road, creating high luxury, individually-tailored ‘halo” vehicles – some 100 of these jobs will be newly-created engineering and other highly-skilled operational roles. The location will complement Jaguar Land Rover’s engineering, design and testing facilities at Whitley and Gaydon, as well as the new Jaguar Heritage workshop at Browns Lane, Coventry and the company’s advanced manufacturing facilities.

The first vehicle to roll out of the new SVO workshop will be the Jaguar F-Type Project 7, the most powerful and fastest production Jaguar to date. This is an exclusive product, with just 250 models being made available worldwide. Each F-Type Project 7 will start life at the company’s plant in Castle Bromwich, before transferring to the Special Operations Technical Centre to complete the build by hand.

Jaguar Land Rover continues to deliver on its strategic growth plans, which will see the company investing in 50 new product actions over the next five years. This includes £1.5 billion to introduce an all-new, technically-advanced aluminium vehicle architecture in forthcoming models, beginning with the new Jaguar XE premium saloon to be manufactured from 2015 at the company’s Solihull facility. The new Land Rover Discovery Sport, which will go on sale in 2015, will be the most versatile and capable vehicle in the compact SUV segment. It is the first member of an all-new family of Discovery vehicles, inspired by the Discovery Vision Concept which was showcased at the New York International Auto Show in April 2014.

Clive Goldthorp

13 Comments

    • In many ways it is indirectly full circle for one of the brands – Land Rover, which of course was originally formed by the Rover Company Ltd, whose own origins in car making started in Coventry.

      Great news and also good to see something very exciting continuing to maintain vehicle assembly in Ryton. Good luck to SVO and I await with interest to see what else they will announce after the F Type Project 7.

  1. Helping to right a wrong done by PSA with the help of a lot of our money via the EU to close a profitable factory (unlike most of their French ones) and relocate production in Eastern Europe.

    I am not anti the EU principal, but anti the stupid politicians who helped PSA do this with our money.

    • A slight contrast between high end tuned/customised Range Rovers and F-types, and the 206s that used to be made there!

      Jaguar’s Whitley centre used to belong to PSA/Chrysler/Rootes as well…

  2. Jaguar really means business now and has moved on from being part of Ford and the ill fated British Leyland.

  3. Can anyone these days, especially in the motor trade, describe something without resorting to the lazy and miserable cliche ‘iconic’?

    Let’s expand our vocabulary and find less worn adjectives!

    Then again, more importantly, well done JLR: producing wealth, creating jobs and sustaining families in many regions of the UK.

  4. I lived in Coventry in 1990 and Jaguar still had its two factories, Peugeot had Ryton, Rover’s HQ were in Canley and, of course, there was London Taxi International.

  5. One of the cars that will be worked on at the SVO dept will be a replacement for the old Daimler Limo, based of an XJL platform, along with a number of other projects based on current prodcution and you have no seen the last of the retro builds either.

    • Interesting. Does that signal the return of Daimler, or a stretching of the Jaguar brand to cover a wider range of markets, a bit like Mercedes?

  6. I’m a big fan of JLR, so don’t get me wrong, but…

    …aren’t all growth plans “strategic”?

    …why “product actions”? Are they fancier than “products”?

    Please, JLR, don’t fall into the trap of stupid-sounding business buzz-speak.

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