Erin Baker – JLR's special branch ready to go

A few assembled journalists sit in a glass office, blinds drawn, as the senior executives in charge of the various bits of SVO – vehicle personalisation, the engineering side of it and so on – talk about what this new building, which represents a £20m investment with 200 dedicated staff on board, can do. They call it a “customer-facing facility”, which basically means there is a very clever, swish commissioning suite where you can come to spec up your bespoke Range Rover or F-Type. Customers can play around with various coloured “lozenges” on an interactive digital table - place a lozenge on it and the screen in front of you, showing your car, will change to match the colours. You can repeat the process with threads, leathers, two-tone paint schemes, different wheels and so on. It’s much fun.

But it’s the classics side of the business where stand-apart innovation is being shown, and the link between the stunning heritage of both Land Rover and Jaguar is brought right up to date in this state-of-the-art facility.
As Jonathan Edwards, Managing Director of JLR SVO said: “JLR is known for making some brilliant classic vehicles – there are many people out there who love those products. Possibly we’ve been neglecting them over the years.”

And so we come to the classic division of SVO. “We offer cars that are collectable,” says Tim Hannig, with magnificent understatement, when you consider he is referencing the likes of the Jaguar XKSS and Lightweight E-type continuation cars, or “new originals”, as they call them.

As well as the million-pound-plus classics (“fully restored, very special high-level products”), they offer health checks, repairs, full restorations, spare parts and experiences like race series, hence the opening statement of this column.

There are 1.5 million classic Jaguars and Land Rovers out there (they define a classic as a car more than 10 years old), so it’s hardly surprising that £7.5m of the SVO investment is in the classic facility at the site. Are they putting specialist restorers of both marques out of business with this facility? “We only take a tiny share of the market,” adds Hannig. “We can’t restore all the cars in the world; we work with restorers.”

“We wanted to restore Land Rovers,” he continues, “but the variance is huge.” The answer has been to create something called the “Reborn Series” down the road at Solihull. “We will pick vehicles of the right substance,” says Hannig carefully. “We handpick the right vehicles, buy them, restore them and sell them on.”

It sounds like the right level of injected support into the sky-rocketing classic market, at the right moment, and could bring some very beautiful cars to British roads, and Goodwood soil.