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Jaguar Land Rover remains bullish on diesels

Despite Volkswagen's recent diesel scandal, Jaguar Land Rover is pushing ahead with ambitious plans to roll out the technology across most of its lineup in the coming years. Jaguar and Land Rover will add diesel engine variants to every model in their lineups, except for the Jaguar F-Type sports car. Land Rover launched the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport with available 3.0-liter turbocharged V6 diesels, and together they have sold more than 330 units so far in September, their first month on sale in the United States. JLA officials say they've seen no fallout from VW's emissions problem and are adamant their diesels meet EPA standards. "That has been our strategy, and it is not changing," Joe Eberhardt, Jaguar Land Rover North America CEO, told the Automotive Press Association on Wednesday in Detroit. "You have to deal with the situations as they arrive. We are confident of diesel." Jaguar will get another diesel next year from its Ingenium engine family, which will initially be sold in the XE sedan and the F-Pace crossover. It's a turbo 2.0-liter four-cylinder unit and makes 180 horsepower and 317 pound-feet of torque. A JLR spokesman said the Ingenium has not yet gone through the EPA certification process, and the diesel-powered models will arrive in the fall. Jaguar also plans to add diesel engines to the flagship XJ and XF sedans. Land Rovers, including the Discovery and Evoque, will also get diesel options, and the company estimates the technology will offer 20- to 30-percent improvements in fuel economy, depending on the vehicle. Eberhardt said it is "too soon to tell" if the diesel market will be weighed down by Volkswagen's situation. The German automaker admitted to cheating on emissions tests to make its diesel-powered cars appear to run cleaner than they actually do in real-world situations. The ensuing outrage forced longtime VW chief executive Martin Winterkorn to step down and prompted a reorganization of the company, which faces legal and regulatory action around the world. Still, Eberhardt maintains JLR is "very confident" in its diesels, which are part of its strategy to grow sales around the world. Land Rover has experienced rapid growth under the ownership of Indian conglomerate, Tata Motors, while Jaguar is set to revitalize its lineup with new entries like the XE and F-Pace to reach a broader market segment.

The UK votes for Brexit and it will impact automakers

It's the first morning after the United Kingdom voted for what's become known as Brexit – that is, to leave the European Union and its tariff-free internal market. Now begins a two-year process in which the UK will have to negotiate with the rest of the EU trading bloc, which is its largest export market, about many things. One of them may be tariffs, and that could severely impact any automaker that builds cars in the UK. This doesn't just mean companies that you think of as British, like Mini and Jaguar. Both of those automakers are owned by foreign companies, incidentally. Mini and Rolls-Royce are owned by BMW, Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata Motors of India, and Bentley by the VW Group. Many other automakers produce cars in the UK for sale within that country and also export to the EU. Tariffs could damage the profits of each of these companies, and perhaps cause them to shift manufacturing out of the UK, significantly damaging the country's resurgent manufacturing industry. Autonews Europe dug up some interesting numbers on that last point. Nissan, the country's second-largest auto producer, builds 475k or so cars in the UK but the vast majority are sent abroad. Toyota built 190k cars last year in Britain, of which 75 percent went to the EU and just 10 percent were sold in the country. Investors are skittish at the news. The value of the pound sterling has plummeted by 8 percent as of this writing, at one point yesterday reaching levels not seen since 1985. Shares at Tata Motors, which counts Jaguar and Land Rover as bright jewels in its portfolio, were off by nearly 12 percent according to Autonews Europe. So what happens next? No one's terribly sure, although the feeling seems to be that the jilted EU will impost tariffs of up to 10 percent on UK exports. It's likely that the UK will reciprocate, and thus it'll be more expensive to buy a European-made car in the UK. Both situations will likely negatively affect the country, as both production of new cars and sales to UK consumers will both fall. Evercore Automotive Research figures the combined damage will be roughly $9b in lost profits to automakers, and an as-of-yet unquantified impact on auto production jobs. Perhaps the EU's leaders in Brussels will be in a better mood in two years, and the process won't devolve into a trade war. In the immediate wake of the Brexit vote, though, the mood is grim, the EU leadership is angry, and investors are spooked.

Jaguar Land Rover gives Lyft $25M and a fleet of cars

Lyft recently raised $600 million in a massive funding round, and now we know that $25 million of that came from Jaguar Land Rover, via its mobility services subsidiary InMotion. The car maker's investment in Lyft goes beyond just funds, however; it's providing Lyft drivers with a fleet of Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles as part of the tie-up, and it's also going to work with the ride-hailing tech company on autonomous vehicle testing. This is yet another high-profile partner for Lyft after a spate of recent new collaborators, including Waymo and, just last week, Nutonomy. Now, Jaguar Land Rover is also joining the company's Open Platform for autonomous cars: The collaboration with InMotion will see the Jaguar Land Rover-owned company "develop and test its mobility services, including autonomous vehicles" using Lyft's platform. Lyft's ability to rapidly bring on a lot of partners in the car maker space, specifically around autonomy, may have a lot to do with rival Uber's ongoing problems, which now also include mounting calls for CEO Travis Kalanick to step back, at least temporarily, from his leadership role. Lyft has also been pretty clear about seeking to partner on autonomy, rather than pursue its own tech, which is likewise different from Uber's current approach. Uber, too, has brought automakers to the table around self-driving services and making use of its ride hailing platform for mobility service offerings. Both Uber and Lyft seem interested in being the layer that connects riders and these future services, and for automakers, it means leaving a complex and challenging part of the picture to partners with experience and expertise, rather than having to spin up that part of the tech business themselves. The fleet provision in the deal is also interesting, and suggests the partnership between the two could involve more strategic cooperative service offerings ahead of the advent of commercial self-driving tech. Lyft gaining more ground among automakers beyond longtime partner GM also explains why it was reported that the ride hailing company turned down overtures regarding a potential acquisition by the Detroit-based automaker.Written by Darrell Etherington for TechCrunch.Related Video: