Land Rover preparing Jaguar-based Grand Evoque for 2016

The differentiation between Jaguar and its sister company Land Rover used to be fairly clear: Jaguar makes cars, and Land Rover makes SUVs. But that line is about to get a little blurred.

Apparently no longer content to let Land Rover have all the high-riding fun, Jaguar is preparing to launch a crossover over its own, based on a new lightweight aluminum platform and previewed by the C-X17 concept (pictured below) that was unveiled just last month in Frankfurt. But the latest reports suggest that Land Rover could, in turn, spin its own crossover off the new Jaguar architecture.

That new crossover, according to analysis published by Bernstein Research and reported by Autocar, could be the long-rumored Evoque XL. Alternatively referred to as the Grand Evoque, the new model was expected to arrive more or less simply as a stretched version of the existing Evoque (pictured above), but is now tipped to be based instead on the new Jaguar platform.

The project – codenamed L560 – would be both larger and more expensive than the production C-X17, and bridge the gap between the Evoque and the Range Rover Sport. Projected to out-sell the other three models in the Range Rover family, the larger Evoque (or whatever JLR ends up calling it) is tipped to arrive in 2016, so watch this space for more on this development.