Jaguar Land Rover has announced it is to expand its Advanced Engineering and Design Centre in Coventry.

The British manufacturer has completed the purchase of an additional 62 acres at Whitley, more than doubling the current 55-acre site and adding an area equivalent to the size of over 30 football pitches.

The expanded facility will house product development engineers and support Jaguar Land Rover’s long-term ambition to create hybrid and eventually fully electric versions of its current model lineup.

In the financial year to the end of March 2016, Jaguar Land Rover says it will spend over £3bn on product creation and capital expenditure. The company’s strategy will see 50 new and model year vehicle upgrades over the next five years.

Jaguar Land Rover has more than doubled its workforce in the last five years, claiming to have created 18,000 new jobs in the process. Some 8,000 engineers, technologists and designers are based at its two UK engineering and design centres at Gaydon and Whitley and an advanced research centre at the University of Warwick.

The announcement of Jaguar Land Rover’s Whitley expansion follows the recent unveiling of the foundation stone and the start of construction of the £150 million National Automotive Innovation Centre (NAIC), which will open at the University of Warwick in spring 2017, providing a new technology hub for Jaguar Land Rover’s advanced research team and collaborative partners from the supply chain and academia.

The NAIC is a partnership between the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), Jaguar Land Rover, Tata Motors European Technical Centre (TMETC) and UK Government’s Higher Education Funding Council England (HEFCE).

In addition to the development at Whitley, Jaguar Land Rover has also confirmed this week that it has made an investment of over over £400m at the company’s Castle Bromwich plant to support the introduction of Jaguar’s latest model, the all-new XF.

£16m has been spent on a new blanker line which will allow the plant to turn coils of aluminium into ‘blank sheets’ that will be pressed into body panels and parts on a new Aida £50m press line which is currently under construction. This line will feed in to the new £320m body shop, said to be the most flexible and versatile of its kind throughout Jaguar Land Rover, capable of switching between Jaguar’s entire range of models mid-production. Finally £30m has been invested in upgrading the trim and final assembly hall.

Source: Jaguar Land Rover

Tags: automotive design, Castle Bromwich, Coventry, Gaydon, HEFCE, Jaguar Land Rover, manufacturing, NAIC, National Automotive Innovation Centre, Tata Motors European Technical Centre, TMETC, UK, University of Warwick, Whitley