Baby Range Rover confirmed in Land Rover shake-up

By Phil McNamara Motor Industry 24 September 2009 11:08 The shake up at Jaguar/Land Rover continues, with a consolidation of the brands’ Midlands manufacturing facilities announced alongside plans for more vehicles. The headline news is that Land Rover’s Solihull factory and Jaguar’s Castle Bromwich plant will be amalgamated over the next 10 years. JLR promises there will be no compulsory redundancies, and the industrial logic is compelling: consolidating production of the Range Rover/Discovery and XJ/XK/XF lines will bring around 200,000 vehicles together under one roof – still 100,000 fewer cars than Mini builds a year down in Oxford. The move will reduce JLR’s fixed costs, provide room to grow and give greater flexibility to meet the natural ebb and flow of demand. JLR has also confirmed production of the LRX, the baby Range Rover.

Kia turn to consumer reviews to drive the brand

Kia is launching a brand awareness campaign in the UK with the main focus being on over 3000 consumer reviews on the Kia website. It looks like Korean twins Hyundai and Kia are both going to be concentrating on building the value of their brand in 2013. Yesterday we learnt that Hyundai are to focus on brand building in 2013 rather than chasing big sales increases, and today Kia has revealed it is following a similar path with a new marketing campaign built round consumer reviews of Kia cars.

BMW M135i Concept heading for the Geneva Motor Show

The BMW M135i Concept is heading for Geneva BMW are taking the first petrol-engined car in its new M Performance range to the 2012 Geneva Motor Show – the BMW M135i Concept. It looks like BMW are going to be rolling out their new sub-M range of cars across the entire BMW range. We’ve already had the big diesel bruisers of the new M Performance Range – the M550d, X5 M50d and X6 M50d – revealed ahead of Geneva – and news of the M Performance Parts for the 1 Series.