Artist's rendering of Jaguar Land Rover engine plant in Wolverhampton, England
There was a time when Jaguar designed and built some of the most advanced gasoline engines made and Land Rover built it's own diesel powerplants that had a reputation for durablility. However, Jaguar currently buys most of its engines from Ford, an artifact of when the Dearborn automaker owned Jaguar. Jaguar hasn't built an engine of its own design since 1997. Land Rover's last in-house powerplant was the Td5 diesel in 1998 and the company has used a variety of engine vendors including Ford, BMW and Perkins. Next year, Jaguar Land Rover's new $750 million dollar engine plant in Wolverhampton, England will start building a JLR designed four cylinder diesel and about a year and a half later than that the factory will start producing a turbo four cylinder petrol engine. The engine plant will have a capacity of 300,000 engines per year.
"When we manufacture our own engines ourselves, it gives us an additional degree of freedom," said Wolfgang Ziebart, 63, Jaguar Land Rover's group engineering director, said in August.
According to published reports, the new engines will be light, powerful and small, about 2.0 liters, and they will have advanced features like turbochargers, direct injection of fuel, and variable valve timing and lift. Three cylinder engines displacing ~1.5 liters are also possible. They will be the very models of modern powerplants. "You can be sure if we make our own engines, they will excel in technology," Siebart said. "We will probably set a new benchmark in terms of engine efficiency, weight and power per liter, and so on."
The Range Rover Evoque, which is currently powered by a version of the 2.0 liter four cylinder Ford EcoBoost engine, is likely to get the new JLR built motors.
Ziebart said the company is setting up the new engine plant now. "The machinery is moving in, the first machines for the block and heads are being installed. We will manufacture the first prototype engines by spring next year and first [production] engines come at end of next year."
Ziebart also raised the possibility of a Jaguar designed and built three cylinder engines. Perhaps the only things automotive that are proliferating as quickly as compact crossovers are three cylinder engines.
"If we could come up with similar performance as the four-cylinder, I think this could be an alternative, too," Ziebart said.
Ziebart confirmed that the plant will have two production lines, one for gasoline and one for diesel and that the diesel and gasoline engines will share a common architecture including cylinder blocks with common bore spacing, crankshafts and oil pans. The Wolverhampton plant will be flexible and can change the engine mix based on changing consumer demand.
from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com
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