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Jaguar I-Pace concept previews all-electric SUV for 2018

It seemed that Tesla would stand alone for years with a battery-electric SUV. The Germans were coming, of course, but they appeared content to time their battery push until government regulations forced them there around 2020. That's all changed. Jaguar is promising to turn its I-Pace concept SUV into a full-fledged production crossover SUV within two years. It's Jaguar's way of leaping from internal-combustion power, clean over the top of plug-in hybrids, straight to zero-emission battery-electric vehicles. It says a lot about Jaguar's focus that the second SUV in its production history will also be its first electric car. It debuts this week at the Los Angeles auto show. The Indian-owned carmaker is promising the five-seat I-Pace will look, feel, handle, and perform like a proper Jaguar, too, with a 0-60-mph time of around four seconds. With 516 pound-feet of torque being pumped out of its two electric motors, the I-Pace has as much gristle as the pure-bred F-Type SVR sports car, and it has it from zero rpm. It's also promising the two motors will combine for 400 horsepower, too. It won't need to compromise on range to get its performance, with Jaguar promising the I-Pace will stretch across to 220 miles of range from its 90-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack. It will also take two hours to charge on a 50-kW fast-charging DC station, or achieve 80 percent charging in 90 minutes, and Jaguar insists commuters who drive about 30 miles a day would only need charging once a week. It won't be the last EV from Jaguar Land Rover, either, with its scalable modular architecture designed from scratch to spread across the corporate portfolio and to move down to smaller sedans and coupes or up to full-sized Range Rover contenders. The crossover SUV uses the alloy battery casing as an integral, stressed part of the I-Pace's chassis architecture, lowering the ride height and adding body rigidity. After entering the all-electric Formula E championship this year, Jaguar says it designed and engineered the batteries and the electric motors in-house. "This is an uncompromised electric vehicle designed from a clean sheet of paper: we've developed a new architecture and selected only the best technology available," said Jaguar Land Rover's technical development leader, Wolfgang Ziebart.

Driving Jaguar's Continuation Lightweight E-Type

Something has happened to sports cars over the past 15-20 years. While reaching ever-higher levels of quantitative dominance the driving experience continues to become more sterile. Stability control, torque vectoring, variable electronic steering racks, lightning-quick dual-clutch automatic transmissions – all these make it easier to harness more power and drive faster than ever before. And yet too often it feels like something is missing. There is a growing divide between the capabilities of the modern performance car and the driver's sense of connection to the experience. In an era like the one we're in now, the Jaguar Lightweight E-Type hits you like a slap in the face. The story of the Lightweight E-Type goes back to 1963, when Jaguar set aside eighteen chassis numbers for a run of "Special GT E-Type" cars. These were factory-built racers with aluminum bodies, powered by the aluminum-block, 3.8-liter inline-six found in Jaguar's C- and D-Type LeMans racecars of the 1950s. Of the eighteen cars slated for production, only twelve were built and delivered to customers in 1964. For the next fifty years, those last six chassis numbers lay dormant, until their rediscovery a couple of years ago in a book in Jaguar's archives. In an era like the one we're in now, the Jaguar Lightweight E-Type hits you like a slap in the face. Jaguar Heritage, a section of Jaguar Land Rover's new Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division, took on the task of researching the original Lightweight E-Types and developing the methods to create new ones. Every aspect of the continuation Lightweight E-Type, from the development of the tools and molds used to build the cars, to the hand-craftsmanship, reflects doing things the hard way. They may not build them like they used to, but with these six special E-Types, Jaguar comes awfuly close, if not better. Working alongside the design team, Jaguar Heritage made a CAD scan of one side of an original Lightweight E-Type body. That scan was flipped to create a full car's worth of measurements. That ensured greater symmetry and better fit than on the original Lightweight E-Types (which could see five to ten millimeter variance, left-to-right). The scan was also used to perfect the frame, while Jaguar looked through notes in its crash repair books to reverse-engineer the Lightweight E-Type's suspension. The team repurposed a lot of existing tooling for the continuation cars, and developed the rest from analysis of the CAD scan.

Jaguar Land Rover mulling factory in Georgia?

London's Sunday Times reported last October that Jaguar-Land Rover was sniffing around The South looking for a potential manufacturing site, and was "talking to several southern states." We imagine Georgia was one of them; The Peach State has Kia Motors Manufacturing in West Point, it claims Porsche HQ as a resident, and soon the Mercedes-Benz regional office, too. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has said that Governor Nathan Deal recently took the initiative to fly to the UK to "make prospect calls" with JLR executives about a deal. We don't have any details about the calls, but we'll guess that they involved Deal making a financial case for GA over other states while sipping a cup of tea. It's said that the English luxury maker wants to build a factory here with a 200,000-unit capacity, to take advantage of the same financial efficiencies that have planted other automakers in the US and Mexico; it opened a facility in China last year to build the Range Rover Evoque, Land Rover Discovery Sport, and the Jaguar XE, and is casting eyes over Brazilian and Saudi Arabian soil for other facilities. No timetable has been given for a decision. Related Video: News Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Automotive News - sub. req.Image Credit: AP Photo/Tony Ding Government/Legal Plants/Manufacturing Jaguar Land Rover Luxury