According to car company Jaguar Land Rover, the global car industry will not start to recover for two years. To reach pre-recession levels of new car sales and car finance sales will take five years, the company said.

UK car sales slumped last year, by as much as 30 per cent, and JLR made it clear that this year will see the same fall. Only those car companies that can cut their costs down and invest in models for the future will survive the recession, the company claimed.

The managing director of Land Rover, Phil Popham, reportedly commented: At the moment we are planning on the assumption that it will be a couple of years before the industry starts to improve drastically, and may be five years before returning to the pre- credit crunch trends we were seeing globally in the motor industry.

JLR has a huge research budget to cut vehicle carbon emissions .