It’s been a long, miserable, and costly journey for Jaguar-Land Rover, but the Indian-British automaker seems to finally be back on its feet (for the most part) following a devastating cyberattack that ground operations to a halt on September 1. Over five weeks ago, production at JLR’s factories was shut down along with the rest of the company’s global business, but now production has restarted at its Wolverhampton engine plant and Birmingham battery center. From there, stamping operations should soon restart at the automaker’s Castle Bromwich, Halewood, and Solihull locations. Its Solihull body shop, paint shop and logistics center — which feed its global operations — will also restart today.
JLR isn’t quite at the point of full-scale vehicle production just yet, but it’s coming at an unspecified point this week, according to Autocar. It will start with the Land Rover Defender and Discovery on its lines in Nitra, Slovakia and the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport lines at Solihull. A production restart at the Halewood facility, which builds the Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport, is still up in the air, but JLR says updates “will follow.” This isn’t too much of a surprise — the plant is currently in the midst of a massive $670 million renovation to build JLR’s upcoming EVs.
A massive cost
Jaguar-Land Rover wasn’t exactly doing well before all of this happened, so the financial hit of a near-total shutdown that lasted over a month is — as you’d expect — pretty gnarly. It’s estimated that the attack and shutdown cost JLR a tick over $2 billion in lost sales, according to a separate Autocar report. That is an astonishing amount of money. Additionally, it cost JLR about $67 million a week.
A loss like this doesn’t just impact JLR either: It also has a heavy effect on nearly 700 downstream suppliers who build smaller parts for its cars. Without intervention, it was very likely that some of these companies could have gone bust, but luckily for them, the British government stepped in by underwriting their own $2 billion loan to JLR. It’s meant to help both the automaker and suppliers who were hurt by the shutdown.
Building no cars for over five weeks is going to hurt your sales numbers, and the automaker’s wholesale and retail sales volumes dropped 24.2% and 17.1% respectively. In total, the company moved 66,165 vehicles in the three months leading up to September 30 — a 21,138 vehicle drop from the same time in 2024.
Jaguar-Land Rover has a lot of work to do if it wants to right the ship. Let’s see what it can do.
