JLR Isn’t Worried About A China-Built SUV That Looks Like A Land Rover

JaguarLand Rover (JLR) has nothing against the new Freelander brand coming to the UK, the carmaker’s new CEO has said.

PB Balaji told Autocar that the Chinese-built SUV that features signature Land Rover design cues won’t affect sales of current Land Rover products if they are sold in the UK and Europe.

Longer, wider and taller than the standard wheelbase Range Rover, the Freelander 8 production luxury SUV was unveiled in early May in China as the first in a series of new Freelander-badged vehicles for global markets.

JLR Says Freelander 8 Is Not a Competitor to Discovery, Defender Models

Designed by JLR but engineered and built by Chery Auto under the Chery JLR joint venture in China, the Freelander 8 will be followed by a new model every six months for the next five years. The new Freelander brand is pitched as a premium technology EV brand, and its first product clearly demonstrates that.

The Freelander 8 features an 800-volt extended-range EV architecture, Huawei’s Qiankun ADS 5.0 intelligent ADAS suite enabled by a 896-channel LiDAR, i-ATS intelligent all-terrain system that uses data from the LiDAR and binocular camera for terrain recognition, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8397 computing architecture, and more.

Add to that the aggressive pricing strategy that Freelander is expected to adopt in overseas markets and the fact that its first product is similarly sized to the Land Rover Defender 110 and Discovery, and it’s a bit surprising that JLR doesn’t seem at all bothered by the prospect of the Freelander 8 landing in the UK and Europe.

JLR’s CEO explained that the Freelander brand targets a different audience than its Discovery and Defender models. “The price positioning of Freelander and our price positions are different," PB Balaji told Autocar. "The product offerings are different. So we don't see ourselves competing with each other. We see it as ‘together we should be expanding the market.’”

JLR Won't Stop Chery From Bringing Freelander SUVs to UK, Europe

Freelander 8 sales will kick off later this year in China before the SUV is exported to other regions. The Middle East is expected to become the first export market, but Chery has not ruled out bringing the 8 to Europe and the UK as well.

Freelander CEO Wen Fei previously said that if the brands starts exporting vehicles to Europe, those models would be bespoke derivatives tailored to each market’s demands rather than just adapted Chinese-market models.

While JLR has licensed the Freelander name to Chery, it still owns it and could put a wrench in Chery’s overseas expansion plans if it wanted to. However, it would probably act against its own interest in doing so. Since it's part of the joint venture that makes the Freelander 8, it will likely get proceeds from its sales.

Asked if JLR would give Chery its blessing to sell Freelanders in the UK, Balaji said that “it’s Chery’s car” and it's entirely up to them.

“The car will be sold primarily in China to begin with, and then they will have to decide their plans for bringing it out to the rest of the world,” the CEO added. “And from our perspective, our role is ensuring that the design is in sync with what JLR stands for, and thereafter it is completely their baby.”

The latter part of the statement is a strong suggestion that Freelander SUVs won’t share showroom floor with Land Rover products or be marketed by JLR in the UK and Europe.

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