How will Jaguar convince fleet buyers that JLR has the right products for them?

You can pin nearly all our growth in the last five years to retail. If you look at our fleet and corporate performance, it doesn’t follow the same trajectory. I put that down to having a competitive offer in the market place both from a finance/cost of ownership perspective and also from a CO2 point of view. The third thing is range, having the cars. We’re now in a position where we can really start to exploit that with XE, XF, Discovery Sport and Evoque which all have the new Ingenium engines. We’ve got 99g/km CO2 from the XE, 109g/km in an Evoque, 129g/km in the Discovery Sport and F-Pace and 104g/km in an XF.

What about RVs?

We have worked really hard with the residual value setters to make sure we can benchmark against the competition on RVs. Then things come together, so we can go to the fleets and say we’ve got the range. We always go as Jaguar Land Rover to fleets – business to business and we’re really happy to do that. We will never merge the brands together anywhere else, but we will go as Jaguar Land Rover.

How does the JLR fleet structure work?

We’ve supplemented that with our own dedicated national account managers, we have demonstrators, we’ve got fleet specialist retailers, focused on delivering this and it’s starting to pay dividends. XE is ahead of the retail performance and that’s where I wanted to be, because XE is a 70% fleet car.

We had separate Jaguar and Land Rover fleet teams, but fleets were saying to us, “Why do I see Fred from Land Rover on a Monday and Bill from Jaguar on a Tuesday? I want to have one discussion please.” So it was the natural thing to do. We always thought the brands have got to be separated but it just became so obvious in that environment that one person should go in and represent both brands. So that’s what we’ve done and it has been well received.

What else can JLR offer the fleet sector?

The other thing we are trading on is the Britishness and being the challenging alternative to the established players. We know who the stable of competitors are and when you have had two or three or maybe four, there comes a time when you want something different. Because so many people lease cars, we can say to the leasing companies that they should balance their asset portfolios and we can provide a good balance. That’s the other bit of the argument.

How will F-Pace fit in when you have Discovery Sport too?

If you look at the SUV/Crossover market, we’re forecasting that it’s going to grow by another 40% over the next six years. It has more than doubled over the last five years and it’s the biggest growth market in the world.