Jaguar Land Rover managing director Jeremy Hicks says that diesel models will account for roughly 70% of the company’s sales in the UK despite growing concerns about air pollution.
“I am not convinced that we’ll see a wholesale change away from diesel,” said Hicks. “And we are certainly not seeing any market shift away from diesel today.”
JLR has a n array of diesel models, as the company has been pushing to increase fleet sales, these customers tend to factor CO2 figures into their decision when purchasing cars.
JLR has increased its proportion of fleet sales from 37% to 44% last year and is anticipating a shift towards the industry average of 46% in the next couple of years, according to Autocar.
“We’re catching-up, because we’ve always been dominated by retail sales. But now we’ve addressed whole life running cost issues, helped by the new Ingenium engines, which are giving us CO2 figures like 110g/km in the Range Rover Evoque,” added the JLR exec.
In the future, JLR will be building more diesel-hybrid powertrains to be fitted to both luxury cars and SUV models. There is also a set of four-cylinder petrol-engined hybrids on its way, which will probably power smaller JLR models such as the XE, Evoque and the Discovery Sport.
It doesn’t appear that Jaguar Land Rover are too concerned about Norway’s plans to ban all diesel and petrol internal combustion engines by 2025.