A year after opening a £500-million engine plant in the UK, Jaguar Land Rover has unveiled plans to double its size, and take on new workers.

In a £450-million expansion, the premium car-maker plans to double the size of the “strategically significant” plant to around 200,000 square meters, enabling the company to increase capacity.

JLR set up the engine manufacturing centre near the city of Wolverhampton last year to give it greater flexibility to respond to market needs and future technologies. It currently includes an engine testing facility and separate assembly lines for diesel and petrol engines.

Jaguar Land Rover re-commenced engine production last year after a gap of nearly 20 years. It stopped making engines in April 1996, though it has always maintained control of the design process.

Till now the engine centre has produced over 50,000 low-emission four-cylinder diesel “Ingenium” engines used in the Jaguar XE, the company’s mid-size executive “attainable” car, as also the Discovery Sport. The engines are also being supplied to all three of the company’s vehicle plants, including for the Range Rover Evoque and the soon-to-be-launched Jaguar F-PACE.

“The decision to expand our operations at the site provides a clear signal of our commitment to meeting customer demand for cleaner and more efficient engines, whilst developing the skills and capability that Britain needs if it is to remain globally competitive,” said CEO Ralf Speth in a statement.

In the first nine months of 2015, JLR sold 390,965 vehicles world-wide, in line with the same period the year before, though for the quarter ending September sales were down one per cent on a 32 per cent year-on-year drop in offtake in China.

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