Jaguar Land Rover Factories Still Silent as Hackers Cripple Britain’s Automotive Crown Jewel
When Britain’s proudest carmaker sits idle for a fourth consecutive week, the culprit is neither strike action nor stock shortages. The cause is far darker: a cyberattack that severed Jaguar Land Rover’s digital lifelines and left the company on its knees.
Jaguar Land Rover has confirmed that its forced production halt will continue at least until October 1. Nearly a month has passed since the attack struck in early September, yet assembly lines remain frozen. Systems were shut down immediately in an attempt to contain the damage, but full recovery drags further into the distance.
Worse still, the company admitted two weeks after the breach that some data had fallen into criminal hands. Which data, exactly, remains undisclosed, adding a cloak of secrecy to an already tense situation. Hopes of restarting production by September 23 evaporated, and the silence inside the plants lingers.
Of Jaguar Land Rover’s 33,000 employees, a vast number are at home as the downtime burns through cash. Former Land Rover chief engineer Charles Tennant estimates JLR’s average daily turnover at £75 million, with the attack costing around £5 million a day. Production has ground to a halt at Solihull and Halewood, as well as the Wolverhampton engine plant, with ripple effects reaching Slovakia, China and India.
The seriousness of the crisis is underlined by the intervention of the UK government. Business Secretary Peter Kyle and Industry Minister Chris Macdonald are set to meet JLR executives to discuss safeguarding jobs and stemming wider economic damage.
For a brand whose name is synonymous with luxury and British engineering, the episode feels closer to the plot of a cyber-thriller than the daily grind of car production. The issue now extends beyond cars to trust, security and the uneasy truth of just how vulnerable even industrial giants can be when the plug is pulled without warning.
