Car dealers from the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) retail network have been left “flabbergasted” by the Indian-owned carmaker’s new plan to axe its 75-year-old Land Rover brand.

Tata Automotive’s British OEM revealed yesterday (April 19) that it would ditch the Land Rover name for its range of 4x4 models, instead focussing on Jaguar, Range Rover, Defender, Discovery as part of its new House of Brands retail and marketing strategy.

It will also officially switch its official company branding to ‘JLR’, to remove reference to Land Rover, as part of a move which will spark corporate identity changes in dealerships across the UK which had been subject to a £1 billion Arch Concept corporate identity (CI) transformation in recent years.

The changes come as the OEM prepares to roll-out agency model retail and were met by incredulous response from retailers.

“I’m utterly flabbergasted,” one JLR retailer told AM. “For decades JLR has had some quite significant and well reported issues and the power of the brand has absolutely been it major strength.