Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced that vehicle production will be temporarily reduced until spring 2023, due to a shortage of semiconductors to produce its vehicles.

The vehicles affected are the Jaguar F-Pace and Land Rover Discovery Sport and JLR will concentrate on more profitable models such as the Range Rover.

The reduction only affects JLR factories in the UK and its assembly plant in Nitra, Slovakia, is not affected.

The UK car industry has not yet recovered from the disruption to supply chains caused by the covid pandemic and the main problem has been a regular supply of computer chips from East Asia.

As a result, UK car production in October was 69 thousand vehicles, up 7.4% from the same month in 2021, but still below pre-pandemic levels and the one million vehicles installed capacity the industry is equipped to produce.

JLR pointed out that it has closed supply agreements with other semiconductor manufacturers that will come on stream in the second half of 2023.