LONDON -- Jaguar Land Rover's new flagship full-electric vehicle, the Range Rover Electric, will be the "quietest and most refined Range Rover ever created," JLR said, ahead of the SUV's launch late in 2024.
The Range Rover Electric will have "active road noise cancellation" to help create a quieter cabin environment, JLR said in a statement on Wednesday. It will also have an 800-volt architecture to enable faster charging.
JLR said the car would have "subtle cues hinting at its all-electric drive" rather than being obviously different from the standard model.
The Range Rover Electric will use the same Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA) as the combustion-engine models and built in the same plant in Solihull, England.
JLR has opened what it calls a waiting list for customers, ahead of pre-ordering and actual ordering next year.
The SUV will be launched late 2024, JLR CEO Adrian Mardell said on Nov. 2 during parent company Tata Motors’ earnings call for the quarter ending Sept. 30.
The launch for China will happen early 2025, JLR has said.
Kerrigan Advisors recently sat down with Donnie and Denny Buckalew, co-owners of Buckalew Chevrolet, the 5th highest-volume Chevrolet dealership in Houston, Texas, to discuss their perspective on the changing auto retail industry and how challenges facing single-point dealers influenced their decision to sell their dealership.
The Range Rover Electric will become JLR’s second EV after the Jaguar I-Pace, which went on sale in 2018.
During Tata Motors earnings call for April to June on July 25, Mardell rejected suggestions that JLR has been slow in fleshing out its EV range compared to its premium competition.
"We are good with the timeline. People told us we were too late, but we never actually believed that," Mardell said.
Premium rival Mercedes-Benz has found the market for high-end vehicles difficult in the second half of this year.
JLR plans to source batteries from Tata unit Agratas for its electric models, although initially batteries will come from elsewhere while Agratas builds planned cell plants in the U.K. and India.
Agratas is working with Renault and Nissan cell supplier Envision AESC, the U.K.’s Financial Times reported in August .
The new Agratas batteries are much more energy dense than the LG cells currently used in the iPace, helping packaging. A pack size of 120 kilowatt hours would be achievable from 342 liters of cell capacity, compared to 84kWH from 387 liters in the I-Pace pack, Thomas Mueller, JLR head of product engineering, told investors earlier this year.
JLR has yet to reveal the battery size or planned range of the Range Rover EV.
Battery packs and car’s electric drive units will be assembled at JLR’s renamed Electric Propulsion Manufacturing Centre in Wolverhampton, England. The plant currently produces combustion engines.
