Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has warned it "cannot discount" leaving the UK and starting production in the US to help protect the company from auto tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.
Speaking earlier today, the UK car giant said that while it had "no immediate plans" to shift production away from the UK, but refused to rule out the possibility of leaving.
Adrian Mardell, chief executive of JLR, told reporters: "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."
The car group is based in Solihull and sells roughly 400,000 vehicles annually, with nearly a quarter of them exported to the US.
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Keir Starmer announced plans to help save jobs at the JLR car production site
PABut despite securing a trade deal with the US last week to reduce the tariff amount to 10 per cent for the first 100,000 cars produced in the UK, the car brand has still not ruled out leaving the UK in favour of the United States.
Analysts have warned that JLR's North America sales are expected to drop this year due to the tariffs, as the brand's top-selling "Defender" SUV is made in Slovakia and therefore not covered under the UK deal.
"We'll probably be able to see the implications of all those [tariffs] in the coming quarters," the car giants group CFO PB Balaji said in a media call.
The Land Rover Defender was the best-selling model for the car brand last year, with a total of 114,646 units sold, with 28,321 being sold specifically to the US.
The potential hesitance by JLR comes just one month after Donald Trump announced the punishing 25 per cent tariff on car imports into the US.
The day after, JLR immediately halted shipments to the country until it could assess how to navigate the huge trade interference. In response, Prime Minister Keir Starmer went to visit the plant and pledged to support the workers and the business.
Starmer said: "Jaguar Land Rover, our leading exporter of goods, employs thousands of people across the West Midlands and beyond.
"That proud symbol of British engineering brilliance. And brilliance is the right word. It is our industrial heritage, but also, in my strongly held view, it is our industrial future, not just our heritage. My message to you is simple: these are challenging times, but we have chosen to come here because we are going to back you to the hilt."
To help keep car brands in the UK, Starmer announced changes to the Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, which loosened regulations and penalties for carmakers, hoping to incentivise them to stay in Britain.
Under the ZEV mandate, it required at least 28 per cent of all car sales to be electric by this year before reaching 100 per cent in 2030.
Any carmakers who fell short of this target would have faced hefty penalties of £15,000 per non-compliant car, but this was reduced to £12,000 after the tariffs were introduced.
Starmer added: "We’re going to introduce much more flexibility into EV mandates. We’re going to help car companies based in Britain reach the targets in a way that supports growth."
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Jaguar Land Rover previously paused deliveries to the US after President Trump's initial tariff announcement GETTYStarmer also relaxed some of the rules around hybrid vehicles, which would have been phased out in 2030 alongside petrol and diesel cars, but will now be allowed on roads until 2035.
He commented: "We’re going to cut any fines, which I do not want or expect to see, by 20 per cent and any money that is raised would be invested directly back into support for the British car industry."
