Jaguar Land Rover was aware of a design flaw in a Range Rover steering component years before it widened recalls, and continued telling regulators the problem stemmed from a manufacturing defect even after redesigning the part, according to a Financial Times investigation published this week.
The report centres on steering knuckles — the component connecting each front wheel to the suspension and steering system — fitted to Range Rover and Range Rover Sport models. Fractures in the part can cause a driver to lose control, according to a filing by America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has widened its probe to cover vehicles beyond the 2014-17 models already under recall in the US.
According to the FT, people familiar with an internal JLR investigation said the company knew by January 2021 that the knuckle continued to fail despite earlier changes to its manufacturing process, and by May that year had redesigned the component to shift a structural weak point away from a high-stress area. JLR did not disclose the redesign to regulators at the time, the report said, and continued attributing failures to a supplier's heat-treatment error dating to 2015.
JLR told the FT it rejected "any suggestion that we knowingly failed to act on an identified safety defect," adding that safety remained its highest priority and that it continued to engage with regulators. The company said it had carried out voluntary recalls and notified affected owners "as appropriate." It has recorded no accidents, injuries or fires linked to the issue.
The stakes are significant. An internal presentation cited by the FT referenced nearly 2,700 warranty claims worldwide, and investigators say that if the fault is confirmed across all model years now under review, the number of vehicles potentially affected could rise roughly eightfold, to almost a million. The US Department of Transportation said its engineering analysis would scrutinise both JLR's internal decision-making and its suppliers' processes, warning it had "zero tolerance for fraud."
For Tata Motors, the development lands at an awkward moment. JLR — its most valuable overseas asset and a significant contributor to group profitability — is already cutting a tenth of its workforce as part of a broader restructuring, while still recovering operationally from last year's cyberattack that halted production for weeks. A material expansion of the Range Rover recall, or any regulatory finding of non-disclosure, would add to cost pressures at a business already contending with pricing competition from Chinese rivals in key markets.
