Jaguar Land Rover will become the first luxury automaker to adopt Chery's platform, with the partnership close to being finalized, according to local media.

(Image credit: CnEVPost)

British luxury car brand Jaguar Land Rover will reportedly use Chery's platform to build electric vehicles (EVs), as several foreign brands look to capitalize on Chinese automakers' technology to tap the EV market.

Jaguar Land Rover will be the first luxury automaker to adopt Chery's platform, and the partnership is close to being finalized, local media outlet 36kr said today, citing people familiar with the matter.

The European automaker will build new models using the hybrid and all-electric technology platforms of Chery's Exeed brand, according to the report.

Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India's Tata Motors, has a joint venture with Chery in China, each with a 50 percent stake.

From 2010-2017, Jaguar Land Rover's sales in China grew from 26,100 to 146,000 units. But by 2023, that number fell to 106,400 units, the report noted.

Last April, Jaguar Land Rover announced it would change its name to JLR and split into four separate brands; Range Rover, Discovery, Defender and Jaguar, all focused on EVs.

The company also said it would invest £15 billion ($18.7 billion) over the next five years, which would be spent primarily on factory upgrades, with the ultimate goal of becoming a purely electric brand by 2030.

As planned at the moment, the Jaguar brand will use Exeed's latest pure-electric technology platform, 36kr cited a person familiar with the matter as saying, adding that the first model based on the brand will be released as early as the second half of 2024.

Leveraging the existing technology platforms of China's new-energy carmakers will, to some extent, increase the frequency of product launches and the speed of technology iteration, the report noted.

The odds are that two European luxury brands will want to use Chery's platform, the carmaker's chairman Yin Tongyue said on April 14 on the eve of the Exeed ET's smart driving challenge.

Hours later, another local media outlet, Yicai, quoted Chery's spokesman Jin Yibo as saying that the information about Jaguar Land Rover adopting the carmaker's platform was untrue. The Jaguar Land Rover China team also denied it, according to Yicai.

On July 26, 2023, Volkswagen announced that it would invest about $700 million to acquire a stake of about 4.99 percent in Xpeng (NYSE: XPEV), and the two companies plan to co-develop two Volkswagen-branded EV models for the mid-size car market in China.

Volkswagen will invest 2.5 billion euros to further expand its production and innovation center in Hefei, Anhui province, and strengthen its local research and development capabilities, the German auto giant announced on April 11.

Volkswagen said it will produce two Volkswagen-branded models co-developed with Xpeng in Hefei, the first of which will be a mid-size SUV scheduled to go into production in 2026.

Leapmotor announced last October 26 that Stellantis would invest 1.5 billion euros in it for about 20 percent, making it the EV maker's largest outside shareholder.

The two companies plan to form a joint venture called Leapmotor International, which will accelerate and expand global sales of Leapmotor's products by leveraging Stellantis' global resources, Leapmotor's announcement said at the time.

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