JAGUAR is moving into the home of Land Rover with production on the new XE sports saloon starting at the famous 4x4 factory in the Midlands.

Parent company JLR has invested more than £1 billion in the Lode Lane plant in Solihull where the new XE will be built only yards away from the line where the first Land Rovers were produced almost 70 years ago.

It is the first time the two brands have come together to build vehicles at the same factory.

The lightweight all-aluminium XE will be arriving in the summer priced from £26,995 and will see Jaguar going head to head with the likes of BMW, Audi and Mercedes in the executive market.

The new Jaguar will be made in Europe's largest aluminium body shop which, at 85,000 square meters, is the size of 12 football pitches.

The facility has been built at the Solihull factory specifically to accommodate the latest phase in JLR's development of aluminium in its cars first seen on the new Range Rover three years ago.

Some £500 million has been spent on the XE project which has already created an extra 2,200 jobs taking the Lode Lane workforce up to 9,000 - double that of five years ago.

The 'factory within a factory' at Solihull was officially opened by motor racing legend Sir Stirling Moss on a day of celebration for the Jaguar Land Rover staff who took a break from production to line the roads through the plant as a cavalcade of historic vehicles chronicling the two company's heritage paraded around the works.

The XE will be built alongside the Range Rover Sport and the pair will be joined eventually by Jaguar's new F-PACE SUV which is due to be launched next year.

In full production a model will roll off the line every 78 seconds and almost 650 robots are used in the works to speed up the process.

Jaguar Land Rover now has factories in Halewood on Merseyside, where the Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport models are built, at Castle Bromwich in Birmingham which makes the current Jaguar line up and at Solihull which is also home to the Range Rover, the Discovery and the iconic Defender.

The company also operates research and development facilities at Whitley in Coventry and at Gaydon in Warwickshire and last year opened a new engine plant near Wolverhampton which will supply the Ingenium powertrains for the new Jaguar as well as other new models.

Since being acquired by Tata in 2008 both Jaguar and Land Rover have boomed creating thousands of jobs not only within the company - which is now actively recruiting ex-military personnel as well as seeking workers through the Prince's Trust and other organisations - but also in its supply chain.

Jaguar estimates the new XE will be worth around £4 billion in contracts to its suppliers over the life of the vehicle.