Just how great is Jaguar Land Rover’s ambition? The company insists it does not want to become a volume manufacturer, like BMW. But the available evidence suggests it could well be headed in that direction.

“We have an aggressive business plan. We are growing and we are investing heavily,” group sales director Phil Popham said at the Frankfurt auto show last month. “But it has to be sustainable, profitable growth. We have no aspirations to be a volume manufacturer.” For Popham “volume” means more than 1 million units a year.

But last June JLR’s chief executive in Canada, Lindsay Duffield, revealed at a conference in California that the company plans to reach 750,000 units a year by 2020, with a longer-range target of a million. Based on its recent sales performance, that target might actually be seen as conservative.

In 2012, Jaguar and Land Rover combined to sell 358,000 vehicles. In the first eight months of this year Jaguar sales rose 38 percent and Land Rover’s improved 12 percent, giving an overall improvement for both marques of 16 percent. In the same period JLR’s sales rose 112 percent in China, where the volume is set to increase considerably when production starts in late 2014 at a factory currently being built with joint venture partner Chery Automobile in Changsu, Jiangsu province.

To achieve the planned near doubling of sales by 2020, revealed by Duffield last June, would require a compound annual growth rate of less than 10 percent. Current growth is well ahead of this, analysts say, suggesting the target will be met far sooner. “JLR’s growth in the last two years has already been spectacular. We expect its growth to continue – at a far faster pace than most are anticipating,” said Bernstein Research Senior Analyst Max Warburton in a recent report.

Yet Popham insisted he did not envisage JLR becoming a BMW, which last year sold 1.8 million units globally. “We have no expertise in volume manufacturing,” he said. But even that could be seen as an understatement. Last June JLR recruited Wolfgang Stadler, formerly head of BMW’s largest factory, in Dingolfing, Germany, to become its global manufacturing manager.

In recent years Land Rover has provide most of the growth within JLR. Jaguar, for example, only accounted for 18 percent of group sales in the first eight months of this year. But that is likely to change with the launch of Jaguar models based on the new lightweight aluminum architecture that was previewed at the Frankfurt show in the form of the C-X17 crossover concept. The architecture will first be used in production for a sedan, due in 2015, which will challenge the BMW 3 series and Mercedes-Benz C class.

This new architecture will underpin a wide range of vehicles, said Jaguar’s head of advanced design, Julian Thomson. “At present our cars are large and high-end. We need cars that are more relevant to younger customers, more relevant in an urban environment,” he said. Although a decision has yet to be made on production of the crossover, there is little doubt that it will be built as part of Jaguar’s expanded model plan. “We want lots and lots of products and we want all the incremental products as well,” Thomson said. He said that the design team developed between 20 and 30 different vehicles from the company’s platform to ensure the architecture would suit them all.

The only vehicles the new architecture will not be used for, JLR says, are the large Land Rover SUVs and Jaguar sports cars. That suggests that it will form the basis of the next XF large premium sedan and station wagon as well as future smaller Land Rovers. It already shares some electrical components with Land Rover, Popham revealed.

JLR has spent 1.5 billion pounds (1.8 billion euros) on the new architecture, the company said. That is substantial, but not over-ambitious, said analyst Michael Gartside, who is head of Europe at PwC Autofacts. “JLR appears to be near the top end of the industry from a margin perspective,” he said, “and this should help it recoup the investment on lower volumes than OEMs operating with lower profit margins.”

But the plan should see Jaguar grow substantially, Gartside added. “The two sectors they are planning to enter, the mid-sized crossover and mid-sized premium sedan, are much larger volume segments than those in which they currently compete.”

Jaguar pulled out of the mid-sized premium segment when it discontinued the X-Type sedan and station wagon in 2009. Developed under former owners Ford Motor Co., the Mondeo-based X-Type was largely considered a failure, even though it was on sale for eight years. Said Jaguar’s Thomson, the X-Type’s front-wheel-drive platform led to a bad design. “The proportions of that car were all wrong. It didn’t look mature or powerful, or anything really; it was just a car,” he said.

Both Thomson and Jaguar head of design Ian Callum were closely involved in the development of the new rear-drive architecture and were specific in what they wanted, he said. “We asked for big wheels right at the ends of the car, a low bonnet, short overhangs, very low cabins,” he said. “We wanted the way the car sits on the wheels to be very authoritative.” That’s exactly what this new architecture delivers, Thomson added.

According to the Bernstein report, the cost of developing the new mid-sized Jaguar sedan is “tremendous,” citing the expense of the rear-drive aluminum platform and developing the new four-cylinder engine range. Warburton, however, believes cars like the crossover built off the same platform will help recoup costs, stating in his report: “While we fear the sedan will not be significantly profitable the project will be carried by other variants,” he wrote. “But these are distant problems. Right now JLR volumes – and returns – look set to climb fast.”