Interview: Michael van der Sande

The man leading Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations

Michael van der Sande switched from managing director of Alpine cars to head up Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations in 2018, succeeding John Edwards, who launched the division in 2014. Van der Sande has previously worked at Aston Martin, Tesla and Harley-Davidson. Here, he tells us where the SVO business is at, and where he plans to take it…

What is Special Vehicle Operations in a nutshell?

SVO has three main activities: SV badged cars, vehicle personalisation and JLR Classic. SV is about amplifying the core characteristic of the car and making it as good as it can be – so Range Rover as tactile as possible, XE as fast as possible. Vehicle personalisation is an important part of the business – 6-7000 cars get our special paint finishes each year. Classic is restoration and sales, but also the Continuation cars.

There were high-performance models before SVO…

Yes, we had special cars previously but it wasn’t an ongoing business. John Edwards organised it, with a 250-car run of the F-type Project 7, and the Range Rover Sport SVR. Now we have seven models in the market. We’re unusual in having two brands, Jaguar and Land Rover – compared with M Division and AMG for instance – but Jaguar and Land Rover have different characters and they play in different spaces.

How big is the business?

We sold 9500 cars last year, up 64 per cent. We have 1600 people who work across multiple projects, 4% of JLR workforce, and we account for more than 4% of profits, that’s where we need to be. We have over 2500 JLR retailers globally and we’re looking at building SV specialists – [there were 50 when van der Sande joined, 100 now]

Where are the cars made? Where is SVO based?

The test base is Fen End, our test track and engineering base, and we also have a development centre at the Nurburgring. Project 8 is completely assembled in Coventry, all iTrophy cars [were] too, but sometimes they’re merged into main plants – Range Rover Sport SVR for instance.

What were your first impressions when you arrived in 2018?

John Edwards was very active in handing over the business to me before he retired, he’s a great guy, really passionate, he’d laid good foundations. I was really impressed by the work he’s done in only four years. If I could see any room for improvement, I thought we were maybe trying to do too much. I cancelled the two-door Range Rover – we had orders and customers for that car, but I wanted to focus the business. When you’re growing, occasionally you have to take a step back and say how can we do this really well. We don’t want to grow too fast, it’s more about sustainable growth than sudden growth. We need to space things out a bit – we can do anything we want, but we can’t do everything.

So how did you focus the business?

One of the things was to transfer some model investment into powertrain investment. We can’t be in every powertrain, but we plan for V8s in the future, and we need to have an electrified vehicle in our plan, so we can jump in on time. Over the next 5-10 years we’ll see a mix of powertrains, plug-in, full electric, petrol. The iPace eTrophy is teaching us a lot about heat management and range, which will stand us in good stead. We want to investigate all this new technology, electrification and autonomy, but it’s not simple to introduce that and maintain the emotion of our products.

When will we see an electrified model?

Clearly we’ll do electrification, but we don’t need to do every powertrain option, just what is right for us. As a former Tesla guy, I get the potential, and the technology is already there for an electric SVR – but right now if you drive hard the range won’t last. But costs are coming down, battery density is going up, we will get there. It will be a fascinating journey over the next five years. It’s about the right product at the right time, and embracing new technology while maintaining the emotion of our products.

How will the SV range expand in the future?

We don’t want an SV version of every model, that is not the plan, just the right car at the right time. F-Pace SVR is our most affordable car yet, and we’re having to increase production all the time. It put us in the £75-100k segment, where we weren’t before.

Do SVR cars get people to step up from existing JLR products, or are you bringing new people in?

There is some substitution in some markets, like Range Rover Sport V8 into SVR. Other times we are bringing in new people, like F-Pace SVR.

Will we see more continuation cars?

For Classic, restoration is our bread and butter, not Continuation cars. We have a new Classic business in Essen. German customers are very passionate about British classics – perhaps when you’re in a market that is very dominant, you want something different. These people want their classics looked after by us, without having to come to the UK. But yes, we have some ideas for the Continuation cars, but we have to respect the market for the original cars, and this is an unbelievably expensive activity. We make one or two cars a month, and it’s thousands of hours in each car.

When will we see the next Project car?

We don’t want to do Project cars all the time, we need them to be very special, occasional products, there are more and more cars in this space now, and the market won’t tolerate them all. But we’ve just done Project 8 with the touring pack – some of our customers asked us for something more discreet. We’ll do no more than 15 for the same £150k, and we expect roughly a 50/50 split between 4-seat and 2-seat. The top speed is capped at 186mph because the rear spoiler is removed.

Do you think you should have had an M3 model below Project 8?

We chose not to do an XE M3 rival, but it is perhaps something we can do in the future.

How far could you go? Could you do a bespoke platform?

I was at Aston selling the One-77 in the last crisis, so thanks a lot for that! But it taught me that if you do a very expensive special like that, the market gives you permission to fill in the blanks between. That said, a bespoke platform could happen, but it’s not a priority for now. We need to go steadily, not grow too fast, but we will always do crazy cars like the Project cars – I love driving these cars.

Check out the video below for our take on the latest SVO Project model – the Jaguar XE SV Project 8.