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Range Rover and Range Rover Sport: Land Rover’s $1.55 billion babies

The 2013 Range Rover and Range Rover Sport are the result of a bold $1.55 billion investment that will see the British luxury SUV twins built at a state of the art aluminium bodyshop in England.


Jaguar Land Rover CEO Ralph Speth revealed the cost of bring the new Rangie to market during the international media launch in England for the fourth iteration of the Range Rover that pioneered the luxury SUV segment in 1970.

Land Rover is not yet officially confirming the existence of a second-generation Range Rover Sport, though a follow-up has been spotted testing and is guaranteed considering the remarkable sales success of the original.

A new-generation Land Rover Discovery will also benefit from aluminium construction to reduce its considerable mass.

Nick Rogers, vehicle line director for Range Rover, did confirm a second, unspecified model would be key to maximising the potential output of the Solihull facility that has accounted for $573 million of the $1.55 billion program investment.

The facility is the largest aluminium bodyshop in the world, says Land Rover.

“You could speculate that for a company our size we would want to maximise our investment in the plant.

“We facilitised our body shop to make aluminium SUVs up to 100,000 units with three shifts. This year has been our best year of Range Rover sales, just north of 30,000 which is quite impressive, especially for a 10-year-old car.

“Even if in our wildest dreams we’d like to increase those volumes for the new vehicle, but obviously there’s a big gap between what we’d like to increase our volumes to, to get up to 100,000."

From July 2011 to July 2012, Land Rover sold more vehicles in that 12-month period than it has in its entire 65-year history.

Land Rover says it is spending more than $2.01 billion with global suppliers, with more than two-thirds of that in the UK.

The 2013 Range Rover will be sold in more than 170 countries. It goes on sale in Australia in January 2013.

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