Jaguar Land Rover is showcasing 3 new vehicle platforms for the Concept_e research at the CENEX Low Carbon Vehicle event which runs this week in the UK. The Concept_e platforms are coming out of a $25 million advanced powertrain research program partly backed by the UK government.
The concept platforms are intended for future generations vehicles and the company currently doesnβt have any plan to implement them in its lineup.
The UK-based car manufacturer has yet to enter the electric car market. The automaker is not confident that it could achieve the level of performance its customers are accustomed to if they were to use electric powertrains.
Jaguar Land Rover CEO Ralf Speth had this to say about electric vehicleΒ technology at the Automotive News Europe Congress in Birmingham earlier this year:
βCustomers are not impressed with it currently.Β Battery technology today is still too heavy, too expensive and the [power] density is too low. As we learned at school, thereβs this correlation between mass and energy and as long as this is not favorable, even if you recuperate, this is an issue.β
Technically he is not wrong, but a lot of other automakers are making it work and the technology is evolving extremely fast. He is the CEO of a company with a century of expertise in internal combustion engines, letting go of such expertise to focus on something entirely new, like electric motors and battery technology, would be an understandably difficult thing to do.
They are at least working on some EV platforms, like the ones for the Concept_e program. Here are the 3 concepts:
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Featured image:Β The Jaguar C-X75 plug-in hybrid concept.
Via Green Car Congress.
