Thousands of Jaguar and Land Rover owners in the UK could soon have their vehicles back, as company CEO Adrian Mardell has confirmed a major spare parts shortage there is easing.
In October 2023, news broke that a large parts shortage had crippled dealers in JLR’s home market, with the company’s merging of its regional warehouses into a central distribution centre blamed along with a changeover in suppliers.
As many as 10,000 Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles were reportedly affected in some way by the shortage, and 5000 of those vehicles were off the road according to Car Dealer Magazine.
Despite this, JLR Australia confirmed at the time it wasn’t experiencing the same delays, and that it was “running in the mid 90 percentile range for availability of all Jaguar and Land Rover parts”.
There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel for owners overseas, however. UK publication Autocar reports Mr Mardell confirmed in a recent investors call that the backlog of parts has been reduced to fewer than 2000 parts, though he cautioned the situation would still take time to resolve.
“Those parts need to be put into the vehicles, so the challenge is moved towards dealer availability and capability to fix vehicles,” Mr Mardell reportedly said.
“That’s going to take a bit more time. But the original bottleneck is actually mostly through. It’s not where we want to get it, but it’s mostly through.”
Additionally, in a recent interview with Auto Express, JLR’s UK manager Patrick McGillycuddy said that fewer than 2000 JLR vehicles are currently off the roads due to the parts shortage.
In the investors call, CEO Adrian Mardell reportedly confirmed JLR added 1000 new courtesy vehicles to its fleet in order to get customers into JLR products, while their personal vehicle is seen to.
At the peak of the crisis late in 2023, many customers were given courtesy vehicles from other brands as JLR couldn’t provide enough of its own vehicles.
Mr Mardell reportedly admitted “too many of our customers had to go into non-brand vehicles”.
He then went on to explain that despite the challenges of centralising and consolidating JLR’s warehouses, the effort would ultimately be beneficial.
“We’ve made good progress over the last three months, but this isn’t done. We will stay with this until we’re back and better than we originally were,” he said.
“Frankly, we’re doing this to improve things, not to make things worse. So we will stay with it until things are better.”
