Manufacturer of luxury vehicles Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced that it is investing £65 million in the ‘sustainable expansion’ of its luxury paint operations in the UK and Europe.
This decision was driven by an increase in demand for personalised colour options. JLR has reported that demand for these services has more than doubled since the end of the 2022 financial year.
In order to help meet this demand, JLR will open two new paint facilities – one in Castle Bromwich in the UK’s West Midlands, and another in Nitra, Slovakia. These new paint shops will reportedly support over 17,000 additional client orders per year and make JLR’s most exclusive paint colours available for the first time across its other brands.
A total of £41m will be invested in making the Castle Bromley site the new home of SVO paint operations, with £26m to be injected to ‘replace existing paint booths at the site with all-new highly efficient state‑of‑the‑art application booths’.
Set to be installed in 2025, these booths will use ‘energy-efficient technology and filtration techniques’ to cut energy and water use, while fully automated spray robots will reduce paint waste by 30% compared with hand painting methods.
Jamal Hameedi, Jaguar Land Rover’s director of SVO, explained: “SVO is all about offering our clients unparalleled performance, luxury and capability. That includes the most exclusive, high-quality colour finishes available.
“Range Rover clients are increasingly choosing to tailor their vehicles with more exclusive bespoke and elevated palette paints. By increasing our capacity we can satisfy the demand growth from our Range Rover clients and also expand this service for the first time to clients of our other brands.
A further £10m will be invested in the construction of a new universal paint line this year in Slovakia, where Land Rover’s Defender and Discovery models are manufactured. As well as a new fully electric paint booth, the Nitra site will benefit from new electric curing ovens, which JLR says ‘will avoid around 500 tonnes of CO2e per year’.
Plus, a new Smart Oven control system has also been installed to help optimise existing operations; this system ‘automatically shuts itself down when it detects inactivity’. And a new heat exchanger will also be installed to ‘recover heat from the paint shop flue gas and transfer it into the heating and cooling water production, improving system efficiency and saving around 2,250 tonnes of CO2e per year, the equivalent of using 2,200 barrels of oil’. The exchanger will also save JLR around £750,000 each year, it says.
120 new jobs in Nitra are set to be created by the addition of this facility, and the first cars off the new line are expected in 2026.
Andrea Debbane, chief sustainability officer at Jaguar Land Rover, said: “JLR is seeing a significant increase in clients wanting to personalise their vehicles, so we are preparing to expand our facilities and offer thousands more paint options across our brands, but doing so in the most sustainable and efficient way possible.
“Paint shops are very energy-intensive, accounting for around 80% of our operational emissions, so they represent our biggest opportunity. Our long history means we have facilities with different challenges, some are newer, some much older so we need to optimise where we can, whilst at the same time investing for the long‑term so we can get where we need to be in 10, 15, 20 years’ time to reach our net zero goal.”
This trend in increased demand for bespoke services in the automotive manufacturing sector extends beyond JLR, with Rolls-Royce having announced in early January 2025 that it is investing over £300 million in extending its manufacturing facility at the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex to expand its Bespoke and Coachbuild capabilities, following a 10% year-on-year increase in Bespoke content value per car in 2024.
