JLR to invest £65m to meet global demand for bespoke car colours

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is committing £65m to expand its special paint facilities in Castle Bromwich and Nitra, Slovakia, as part of its strategy to meet the growing demand for personalised luxury vehicles.

As part of a £41m investment in new SVO facilities at Castle Bromwich, £26m will be injected to replace existing paint booths at the site, with all new state‑of‑the‑art application booths set to be installed this year.

120 jobs will be created as part of a new £10m paint line at Nitra in Slovakia, where the Defender and Discovery are manufactured, which will see the addition of a new fully electric paint booth and new electric curing ovens.

This significant investment aims to double the company’s capacity for bespoke paint and luxury elevated palettes, supporting more than 17,000 additional client orders per year.

Demand for personalised colour options has more than doubled since 2022 across Range Rover and Range Rover Sport models, while the most exclusive Range Rover SV models have seen demand double in the current financial year alone.

“Paint shops are very energy intensive, accounting for around 80% of JLR’s operational emissions,” according to Andrea Debbane, JLR’s chief sustainability officer.

Debbane said: “JLR is seeing a significant increase in clients wanting to personalise their vehicles, so we are preparing to expand our facilities and offer thousands more paint options across our brands, but doing so in the most sustainable and efficient way possible.

“Paint shops are very energy intensive, accounting for around 80% of our operational emissions, so they represent our biggest opportunity. Our long history means we have facilities with different challenges, some are newer, some much older so we need to optimise where we can, whilst at the same time investing for the long‑term so we can get where we need to be in ten, fifteen, twenty years’ time to reach our net zero goal.”

The luxury car manufacturer said that new paint booths are set to use the latest most energy efficient technology and filtration techniques to cut energy and water use. Automated spray robots will reduce paint waste by 30% versus hand painting methods, helping to decrease the environmental impact as well as producing a higher quality finish.

Investing in electric ovens will avoid around 500 tonnes of CO2e per year and marks the first step towards longer term ambitions to move away from gas to lower carbon and renewable energy sources to power its facilities.

A new smart oven control system has also been installed to help optimise existing operations, which automatically shuts itself down when it detects inactivity. A new heat exchanger is also being installed to recover heat from the paint shop flue gas and transfer it into the heating and cooling water production, improving system efficiency and saving around 2,250 tonnes of CO2e per year, the equivalent of using 2,200 barrels of oil. The exchanger will also save JLR around £750,000 a year.

Jamal Hameedi, Director of SVO said: “SVO is all about offering our clients unparalleled performance, luxury and capability. That includes the most exclusive, high quality colour finishes available. Range Rover clients are increasingly choosing to tailor their vehicles with more exclusive Bespoke and elevated palette paints. By increasing our capacity we can satisfy the demand growth from our Range Rover clients and also expand this service for the first time to clients of our other Brands.”