Jaguar Land Rover's three-cylinder Ingenium engine is happening

MUCH has been made of the flexibility and modularity of Jaguar's new Ingenium petrol engine family.

The company has stressed the scalability of the powerplant family in the past, but during a recent visit to the company's engine manufacturing plant in Wolverhampton, UK, we saw concrete evidence that JLR is working on a 1.5-litre three-cylinder Ingenium petrol engine.

The crank machining facility had a number of robotic workstations that hone the parts to a polished perfection and on one of them was a plan for the three-cylinder crank, posted alongside its four-cylinder sibling.

Nobody was willing to go on record to confirm where the 1.5-litre engine would end up, but a turbocharged version would appear a solid fit with the E-Pace, providing an attractive entry-level sticker price for a car that's expected to do a lot of Jaguar's volume work.

When the Jaguar XE was launched, programme manager Nick Miller is on record describing the modularity of the Ingenium family. “We’ll be starting with four – but you can drop cylinders, you can add cylinders. The plant they’ve designed up in Wolverhampton is flexible enough to build those derivatives.”

JLR's chief engineer of the Ingenium engine family, Paul Whitwood, also backed up that assertion. “We work on a core 500cc combustion system in the engine,” he said. “That’s important to avoid the need to continually go through this long-winded and expensive development process. It’s just scalable.”

When Wheels asked a Jaguar spokesman which vehicle the three cylinder application would be best suited for, there was an initial denial that anything was known about this engine. Quickly thereafter came, “How did you hear about that?”

Post the plans up for a group of car journalists to walk past and this sort of thing tends to happen. For what it's worth, it sounds a logical development and any broadening of the excellent Ingenium petrol range gets a big thumbs up in our book.