Meet Jag-Land Rover’s new engines

Ingenium. Sounds like an over-the-counter laxative, is actually Jaguar-Land Rover’s shiny new family of lightweight, turbocharged four-cylinder petrol and diesel engines, details of which have been revealed today.

Due to debut in next year’s 3-Series-rivalling Jag XE (above), Ingenium engines will thereafter be rolled out right across the JLR range.

But what is Ingenium, exactly? Well, like BMW’s ‘B-Series’ engines found in the new Mini, i3 and i8, every Ingenium block will share the same bore, stroke, cylinder spacing and 500cc cylinder capacity.

All shall be based around an aluminium block, saving some 80kg on JLR’s current generation of four-cylinder engines, and all will get direct injection, stop-start and variable valve timing.

The first engine off the line will be the 2.0-litre diesel, dubbed AJ200D, in the XE. No word on power outputs yet, but Jaguar has already said the most frugal XE will emit under 100g/km of CO2. Such efficiency will be aided by massively reduced friction compared to JLR’s current four-cylinder diesel, thanks to clever, slippery technologies that make Top Gear’s face hurt rather.

But there’ll be much, much more to follow. The modular 500cc cylinder capacity, says JLR, gives Ingenium ‘the flexibility around which smaller or larger engines can quickly be developed’. Which means the architecture can be scaled up or down – a three-cylinder 1.5-litre seems a probability, and we’re told even a 3.0-litre straight six is possible, too. All Ingenium engines will be capable of incorporating hybrid technology.

Jaguar says Ingenium engines have already undergone more than 72,000 hours on the dyno, and over two million miles of real-world testing.

Ingenium engines will be built at JLR’s shiny new Engine Manufacturing Centre near Wolverhampton, and will share nothing with the firm’s existing engines.

“We were able to design Ingenium this way because we had the rare opportunity to start the project with a clean sheet of paper,” says Ron Lee, JLR’s director of powertrain engineering. “We weren’t locked into any of the usual restrictions that force engineering compromises.”

JLR plans to built 450,000 Ingenium engines annually. That's a serious number: last year, the firm shifted 425,000 cars globally.