Jaguar Land Rover will open a new technology, innovation and education centre at the University of Warwick in 2016, allowing the company to double the size of its current advanced research team.
The company is planning to invest £50m into the construction of the near-£100m complex, called the National Automotive Innovation Campus. It will bring academics from various UK universities together with engineers and researchers from Jaguar Land Rover. Dr. Wolfgang Epple, director of research and technology at Jaguar Land Rover, recently said,
“Investing in collaboration, innovation, research and education is vital if we want to be on a par with our international competitors. Our future sales success, the success of our global business – and the UK economy – lies in the engineering and innovation that will take place in NAIC.
“Creating a new national focus for automotive research and consolidating Jaguar Land Rover’s growing research and advanced engineering operations in one centre offers us huge potential. With a critical mass of research capability we will put the UK at the very centre of the global automotive industry – with the NAIC at its hub.”
With the new facility, Jaguar Land Rover expects to see the advanced research team double in size, from 250 to 500 by the time it opens in 2016.
As for what sort of end products we can expect from the new centre, Antony Harper, Jaguar Land Rover’s head of research, said,
“We will announce the details of the specific research projects on which our NAIC research team will collaborate in due course, but these will be long-term, multi-disciplinary challenges – such as electrification, smart and connected cars and Human Machine Interface – which will help us create some key new technologies that will deliver a low-carbon future.”
Overall, around 1000 engineers and researchers will work in the new 300,000 square-metre facility.
