Land Rover weighs up aluminium Defender

There are two new body shops being built at the Land Rover plant in Solihull. It's the clearest indication yet that the iconic off-road brand is focusing all its heavy-duty four-wheel drive vehicle production around its traditional home in the UK.

During the 65th anniversary celebration for the brand last week, motoring.com.au spoke with John Edwards, Global Brand Director for Land Rover, who revealed that the manufacturer would "stop building" the current Defender in 2015.

Edwards would not admit that its next-generation successor would immediately go into production at Solihull specifically. In fact, he stated: "I can guarantee it won't go into production in '15."

But it will go into production at some point. Development is continuing on the replacement for the current model and negative feedback from the public has apparently ended any likelihood the new Defender will be based on the DC100 show car.

"There's an army of people working on the replacement Defender, so we're progressing very nicely," he said. "The DC100, we put that car out there to get a reaction. And we got a reaction. The car that we put into production will not be the DC100. Much of the feedback we got was a reaction to the iconic design of the current car and whether we'd moved far away from that iconic design language.

"We're pretty sure that when we ultimately show our hand people will be pleasantly surprised."

Asked flat out about any prospect of a move to Indian production for Defender, Edwards simply said: "There is no commitment."

That's not to say that the company wouldn't move to Indian production in the future, but at the present it appears to be off the agenda. Presuming that new Defender production will commence in perhaps 2016, basing manufacture of the new model anywhere other than Solihull looks increasingly unlikely.

The company's operation in Pune currently assembles the Freelander and the Jaguar XF, but to go to full-scale production of the new Defender there within a two- or three-year timeframe would require some impetus right now – and that's simply not happening, according to Edwards.

Asked about a new-generation Discovery, the Land Rover boss acknowledged it was overdue, and the company is currently engaged in the development of a new model.

"No word on timing, but... it's an obvious car... one of our icons," Edwards said. "It's known and loved the world over and we're definitely working on the replacement... but we're not talking about timing."

Land Rover is playing catch-up with its model cycles in the aftermath of financial strife and a difficult commercial environment in recent decades with the company changing hands in rapid succession from BMW to Ford to Tata. Ford sold the company (and Jaguar) to Tata after the global financial crisis of 2008 after relatively short ownership when BMW washed its hands of the profitable but troublesome brand.

Edwards admits that the Discovery -- with Disco 4 treated as a refresh of Disco 3, rather than an all-new model -- is long overdue for replacement. However, as he also pointed out to motoring.com.au that the current Discovery is yet to wear out its welcome.

"Discovery is now as hot as it's ever been..." he said, "particularly the '10 model year refresh -- when we went from '3' to '4' -- it really seems to have hit the spot."

Widely admired and selling up a storm though it may be, the Discovery is second only in age to the Defender among the vehicles in Land Rover's product range. In ideal circumstances the company would be developing new-generation successors to each of its vehicles on a seven-year turn-around plan, but operating conditions have been less than ideal in recent times.

"We typically plan on seven years, but if you go back in our history it's clearly a lot longer than that," Edwards said with a laugh, when asked about model life cycles for Land Rover products.

"The last Range Rover was 10 years [in production]," he added. "If you look back then we've been completely inconsistent. Part of that's because we've gone from [one owner to another]. Generally it's about a seven to eight-year cycle."

At Solihull the following day, Australian journalists were guided through a tour of the aluminium body shop where bodies for the new (L405) Range Rover and new (L494) Range Rover Sport are being assembled.

Described by one of the Land Rover guides as "the world's largest capacity aluminium body shop," the existing facility will shortly stop production of the Range Rover, concentrating solely on the Sport. Range Rover body production will move to a new facility nearing completion, also on the Solihull site.

According to Stuart Frith, Land Rover's Chief Programme Engineer for Range Rover Sport, teething problems building the body of the L405 Range Rover have been ironed out, and the manufacturer can safely shift production of L405 to the new body shop while the existing facility gets cracking on the new Range Rover Sport, which is coded L494.

That means two body shops building aluminium-bodied SUVs at Solihull, with a third (existing) facility building the steel body for the current Discovery. But Land Rover is also constructing a fourth body shop at the plant. At present it's nothing more than a frame of steel girders, but Frith says that it will be building bodies too, eventually.

Given Land Rover's commitment to weight reduction and its determination to ramp up production of all its products in the future, could this be a new facility to build an aluminium body for Defender?

With the company aiming to increase Defender production well beyond today's levels , the Solihull facility will need to accelerate production markedly if it's no longer planned for Defender to be manufactured in India.

There are already signs at Solihull that Land Rover is reducing the cost of aluminium monocoque construction. The plant uses rivets and glue to bond the aluminium panels of the Range Rover and Sport models. Power use throughout the plant is reduced measurably as a consequence, taking the manufacturing process significantly closer to steel body production in terms of cost.

Frith told motoring.com.au that Land Rover is currently engaged in negotiations with the Saudis for the industrial-scale supply of aluminium, a material that can be further reduced in cost by being recyclable. The broader use of aluminium hints at Land Rover ramping up its use of the material beyond the projected sales increases for Range Rover and Sport.

Using aluminium extensively in the construction of future Discovery and Defender models would be contingent on lowering the cost further, since both models are subject to more price-sensitive market positioning than the Range Rover and Sport.

One way to reduce the cost of production for Discovery and Defender would be to place them on the same basic platform, even perhaps using the same frontal crash structure as Range Rover and Sport. With two other volume-selling model lines constructed largely from aluminium, the resulting economies of scale could yield real bargaining power with the Saudis.

This is one possible scenario, but there are other possibilities. The Discovery may remain on a tweaked version of its current ('T5') platform and the manufacturer may even introduce a mix of aluminium body panels in a monocoque structure on a steel chassis that could end up underpinning the Defender too. There are certainly historic precedents in Land Rover's past for a mix of aluminium panels over a steel chassis.

Or the Defender may remain on its own chassis, sharing nothing with either the Discovery or the two Range Rover models.

Only Land Rover knows for sure, and the decision makers at Solihull are saying nothing.

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