Jaguar picks visionary engineer as new boss

Jaguar has named Philip Koehn as its new managing director, his appointment to the top job coming in the wake of the high-profile departure of Jaguar Land Rover CEO Thierry Bolloré in November. The German first came to notice five years ago as chief engineer of Rolls-Royce.

In an exclusive Autocar story timed for the 2017 launch of the Rolls-Royce Phantom 8, Koehn revealed how he was leading a team pioneering a new, highly flexible aluminium spaceframe chassis that would provide underpinnings for forthcoming Rolls-Royce models, all with different body and mechanical layouts, powered by both ICE and electric powertrains.

That experience, and Koehn’s comments about it back in 2017, give a valuable insight into how Jaguar is tackling its own huge challenge of moving, in terms of price and exclusivity, from being a BMW rival to a Bentley competitor. Back in 2017, Koehn explained why Rolls-Royce had moved from using a BMW 7 Series floorpan even though it had been viewed as more economically viable because it could take advantages of economies of scale.

The solution, in which Koehn was a leading pioneer, was to design, build and prove an all-new aluminium spaceframe consisting of aluminium longitudinals attached to lightweight castings for the more complex parts, such as suspension mounts and chassis corners.

Even for low-volume cars, he came to realise, economies of scale could be delivered if you committed to ordering from suppliers very large batches of components that could be utilised for many years.

There’s no confirmation yet from inside JLR that Koehn and his teams are working precisely this way, but their plans echo Rolls-Royce’s very closely. When Koehn revealed his programme for Rolls-Royce in 2017, he described it as the chance of a lifetime. With Jaguar, it seems he has a second one.

Koehn joined JLR in May 2019; formerly of Rolls-Royce, BMW

At Rolls-Royce, Koehn realised a way to deliver economies of scale even for low-volume cars