As their first electric vehicle, sitting on a new platform and powered by new electric motors, we weren’t expecting the new Jaguar I-Pace to go into production so soon.
Set to debut at the 2017 Frankfurt auto show in September before launching in Europe this year, followed by the U.S. in 2018, production of the I-Pace is already underway at Magna Steyr's plant in Austria.
Making this possible was the early collaborative efforts between the Magna team and the Jaguar Land Rover engineers. Speaking with
Automotive News, Karl-Friedrich Stracke, Magna Steyr's president of vehicle technology and engineering, stated that his team was involved with the I-Pace’s development almost from the start. While the guys at Jaguar designed the vehicle, his team figured out how to efficiently build it.
"We were invited very early in the product development time frame in order to provide our process and manufacturing engineering proposals," Stracke said. "We tried to include the right processes in the product early on. In other words, do the product design the right way from the start. We led from the manufacturability point of view.”
This is good news for future I-Pace owners as Magna Steyr has a track record for producing high-quality vehicles including the Aston Martin Rapide sport sedan. Perhaps a glitch free launch will help do away with Jaguar’s old reputation of poor quality products once and for all.
We’ve already seen
spy shots of a production ready I-Pace, now we just need to patiently wait for its official debut.
