10,000 Jaguar and Land Rovers are currently off the road due to parts shortages
Thousands of JLR owners are without their cars, and the firm has run out of courtesy cars
Up to 10,000 Jaguar and Land Rovers are currently undriveable and off the road as the firm struggles with a part supply shortage that is leaving owners ‘stranded’ without their vehicles.
The British firm, now known as JLR, has run out of courtesy cars to put customers into, with some left without vehicles for months. JLR recently held an event with its dealers that looked to address the problem.
Details of this have now been leaked to Car Dealer, which says that ‘5,000 cars in the UK are waiting on parts’, while ‘another ‘5,000 on top of that are waiting on parts’. In the presentation, Andrew Woolliscroft, JLR’s client care director, admitted that the situation was a ‘mess’ and ‘unacceptable’.
Customer Paul Atton, a company director from Filey, North Yorkshire, has been without his 2017 Range Rover Velar for four months, following a small bump earlier in the year that required a replacement front bumper and front radar, which controls the autonomous systems on the car. The wait for the new radar part has left it undrivable and stuck at the repair centre, which he says has left him ‘stranded’.
Atton, 61, told Car Dealer: “I’m four months in without a car and have been stranded and left high and dry. I’ve tried every angle there was, and it’s been upsetting. You just get excuses all the time expressing they’re “sorry”, but there’s still no sign of the part.
“It’s crazy. I bought a prestige, top-of-the-range car and have been badly let down by the availability of parts, which makes me want to move on to another car.”
Atton says he has weekly phone calls with Land Rover, and the part is still said to be a month to six weeks away from being located. He says there are ‘at least five’ other Land Rovers in the same situation where his Velar is stuck.
Lora Lane of Driffield, East Yorkshire, is in a similar situation with her 2017 Land Rover Discovery, which requires a new turbo, and has been off the road for three weeks.
The head veterinary nurse, 40, initially was paying £250 per week for a hire car, though the local garage has now sourced a vehicle to use.
Lane said: “JLR has said they’d allocated us the part, so the garage was hopeful they were getting it in soon, but the allocation has disappeared, and the guy at JLR said they were moving and that they’ve ‘lost’ parts.
“It’s a total pain for us not having a suitable car and extremely stressful.”
The number of cars off the road has left JLR and its dealers without any courtesy cars to put customers into, and has ‘nearly stopped’ its workshops from being able to operate’.
JLR puts the problem down to it building a new global parts logistics centre, named ‘Mercia’, which looks to condense 18 warehouses into one one million-square-foot site. It is also changing parts supplier.
“Mercia is a bottleneck and we have a backlog of orders,” Woolliscroft told dealers at the event.
He called the situation a “mess” and “unacceptable,” and said that “most of the time it is not that we don’t have the part, it’s just jammed in the system”.
A spokesperson for JLR told Car Dealer: “As we deliver our commitment to become carbon net zero across our supply chain, products, and operations by 2039, we are streamlining parts distribution from multiple locations to one global super centre.
“This transition has unfortunately caused some temporary delays to the delivery of parts to our retailers.
“We are working closely with our distribution partner, Unipart, to quickly resolve the issue and ensure the service returns to normal as soon as possible for our clients.”
