It's only a matter of time before Jaguar Land Rover builds a factory in the USA

The clue is in the title. We’re Auto Express and we ensure that the cars are the stars. But occasionally, people deserve as much coverage as products – and this is one of those occasions.

The question I posed in this column a month ago was: could JLR’s owner, Tata of India, make some of its Jaguars and Land Rovers in the USA? Unsurprisingly, JLR’s massive, Mumbai-based parent company failed to answer it. But JLR CEO Adrian Mardell did. Well, sort of.

“We had, and currently have, no cause to build cars in the US at this time, but we cannot discount that it could be the case at some point,” he said.

I interpret these words to mean that he’s very much leaving the door open for the possibility of a newly built US factory or factories to accompany those production lines he has in Brazil, China, India and Slovakia.

JLR is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a 50,000 square foot technology hub in Portland and elsewhere in America. The company’s ‘Reimagine’ strategy remains in place with an official “rethink everything we do” philosophy. And Mardell is a former Chief Transformation Officer (honest) at JLR. So if you can strip away the emotion and instead concentrate on the logic, the logistics and the global political climate, it’s not difficult to imagine JLR having US production lines at some point.

Another auto industry chief with much to ponder is Elon Musk, the world’s best-known electric car advocate. In 2016 he demanded a “popular uprising” against fossil fuels. Yet he’s just accompanied the US President on a tour of the Middle East, the oil-producing capital of the world. Maybe Trump has persuaded him that he’s missing a trick by not building gas-powered pick-up trucks and cars wearing Made in America badges.

Away from the car factory gates, another unlikely relationship has just emerged, after the Aston Martin Formula One team partnered with The Rolling Stones. Merchandise has just gone on sale and there’s even a competition to win a signed Stones/Aston guitar that could become a valuable collector’s item. Or maybe not, because the band’s legendary guitarists are Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood – and both of their autographs are missing from the instrument. Wheeled in instead to sign it were Aston’s unhappy, desperately under-performing F1 drivers, Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll.

They’re fabulously wealthy, not hungry and way too comfortable in their highly paid jobs, in my opinion. Instead, check out William von Linné, the star of the Vriden – Snow Drifting In Sweden short video that has just received my official vote and a category win at the International Auto Film Festa 2025. View the footage at www.autofilmfesta.net or on YouTube and you’ll be exhilarated.

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