Inside Jaguar's Radical, Risky, Roll-of-the Dice Reinvention

Yahoo

01-03-2025

Sir William Lyons said that a Jaguar should be 'the copy of nothing,' and this simple instruction might be his most significant and lasting bequest to the car company he founded. It is the perfect expression of the primary principle of any serious creator, be they designer, engineer, or artist, and the very best Jaguars certainly were the antithesis of imitation. We might see the Jaguar E-Type of 1961 or the XJ sedan of 1968 as period pieces now, but when they first appeared, they were breathtakingly original and modern. The same was true of Jaguar's greatest race cars, such as the C- and D-Types of the 1950s, and of the engineering that lay beneath them all. Sir William's XK engine was both powerful enough to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race five times and refined enough to convey Britain's prime ministers and late queen, staying in production for 44 years.
At its worst, Jaguar copied not other carmakers but itself. Obsessed with and overshadowed by the beauty and purity of those 1960s designs, it repeated them too often and for too long. The flagship XJ luxury sedan rehashed Lyons's 1968 design seven times before it finally got a reboot in 2010, by which point those fresh, elegant lines had become bloated and dated. The same lines were applied, inexplicably, to Jaguar's compact X-Type sedan in 2001, which was meant to rival BMW's cool, contemporary 3-Series. The style of the '60s S-Type sports saloon—bold and feline when introduced—just looked frumpy on the new model of the same name that was launched in 1999 and intended to take on BMW's world-beating 5-Series. Unsurprisingly, both of these Jaguars flopped, and those failures and others hobbled the marque's ambitions to transform into a British BMW.
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The delayed realization among Jaguar's leadership that, like Narcissus, the company had spent far too long gazing at its own reflection at least partially explains the shocking, unprecedented rebranding it revealed at Miami Art Week late last year. That famous name, a redesigned version of the 'leaper' mascot, and a newly truncated rendition of the slogan to 'Copy nothing' are about all that has survived from old Jaguar. Production of five of its six models has already ceased, leaving the F-Pace SUV to soldier on alone for the time being. At some unspecified point in the near future, the last of those, too, will come off the line, and the marque will then enter a production hiatus of about six months before the first new-era Jaguar arrives: a pure-electric grand tourer. Priced from about $130,000, more expensive than the previous models, it will be built in much smaller volumes as Jaguar finally abandons its attempts to rival the German premium marques and asks you to see it exclusively as a luxury brand instead. Two SUVs will follow.
The concept car Jaguar showed at Miami, the Type 00—the first '0' representing zero tailpipe emissions, and the second '0' referring to car zero in the complete brand reset—does indeed copy precisely nothing from the back catalog. Even the aging, loyal customers are being jettisoned. The viral short film produced to communicate the change features a young and conspicuously diverse group of models dressed in whatever lies beyond haute couture striding across a purple lunar landscape. They are intended to represent both the marque's new consumer demographic and its new attitude. One wields a sledgehammer in an unsubtle reference to the destruction of pretty much everything Jaguar once stood for.
The public's reaction, you may have noticed, was intense and often intemperate. If slumping sales figures had led Jaguar's management to believe that nobody cared about the company, the notion was quickly disproved. The rebranding made the mainstream news and ripped across social media. Criticism ranged from the alleged 'wokeism' of the campaign to whether the revised image was actually edgy or luxe at all. 'Like what an aging creative director in Minneapolis thinks is cool in Brooklyn right now,' one anonymous user wrote on X. Everyone from Elon Musk to British right-wing politician Nigel Farage got involved. CEO Adrian Mardell said he wanted the reveal of the Type 00 to match the sensation caused by the launch of the E-Type six decades prior. He certainly got his wish, if not for the reason he'd hoped.
The radical reimagining of Jaguar began four years earlier. The brand is part of the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) group, sold by Ford to Indian conglomerate Tata in 2008 for $2.3 billion. Jaguar was always the weaker sibling, and the disparity in the two marques' fortunes grew as Jag's product faltered, Land Rover's excelled, and the world—especially China—eschewed sedans and sports cars in favor of SUVs.
The Type 00's surfacing is brutalist and monumental: all straight-cut sides and a blunt, arrogant nose.
Jaguar posted record sales figures in the 2018-19 fiscal year, but those numbers masked a failure. In the early 2010s, some on the JLR board—including then–global strategy director Adrian Hallmark, who would go on to lead Bentley and Aston Martin—reportedly were already arguing privately that Jaguar should abandon its fruit-less pursuit of the premium German marques and move decisively upmarket, toward Bentley and Aston Martin. A different view prevailed, however, and in 2014 Jaguar unveiled the XE compact sedan in a second attempt to take on the BMW 3-Series. Jaguar's design director at the time, the celebrated Scotsman Ian Callum, had finally broken the brand's obsession with its past, and his XE looked as sharp as it drove. But the world no longer wanted a small, sporty sedan from a second-tier premium brand, and by 2018 the XE's sales were already in freefall rather than making the transformative contribution to sales JLR had counted on.
Instead, that 2018 record was set by the brand's first SUVs, the F-Pace and the E-Pace, launched in 2016 and 2017, respectively, in response to that shifting demand. But they were never going to sell as strongly as SUVs from a sibling marque with a 70-year heritage of making nothing else, and Jaguar's numbers declined hard and fast from that peak. In the six years leading to 2024, they fell by two-thirds, but even before Covid hit in 2020, it was apparent that Jaguar was in serious trouble. The company had tried SUVs and heavy investment in a high-volume sedan. It had even attempted an EV already, beating its premium German rivals to market with the good-looking, fine-driving I-Pace, another Callum design. But the I-Pace was a little too early, and the company's other efforts were a little too late. It had fired all its shots and now required a radical rethink.
So in 2020, the group's chief creative officer, Gerry McGovern, who had led Land Rover design to some acclaim and had by then taken over from Callum at Jaguar, too, assembled four creative teams at the company's headquarters in Gaydon, in the English Midlands, and told them to produce something unlike anything else on the road—or any Jaguar that had come before. Meanwhile, the firm's marketing department, largely unadvised by external agencies, began work on arguably the most dramatic rebranding the car industry has ever seen. If the endless references to its glorious past weren't winning the new buyers it desperately needed to recruit, it would swing hard (perhaps too hard) in the opposite direction.
Four years on—late in 2024 but well in advance of the Type 00's public debut in Miami—Robb Report was invited to Gaydon to see the result under conditions of the strictest secrecy. The magazine agreed not to publish specifics of the design until the launch date, and my phone was confiscated for the entire day I was on-site. McGovern introduced the Type 00 by telling me that I would feel uncomfortable with it at first, then reassured me that they'd not been 'sniffing the white stuff.'
And the new car was shocking. If I'd expected something that looked like an EV, I got the opposite. The Type 00 is much more attractive in steel than in the rather artificial-looking images the company first released. You might see a connection to the E-Type in the new car's proportions, with its long hood and its low cabin set well back in the wheelbase. But the E-Type had a far more delicate shape, air-sculpted and almost tubular, resembling an aircraft fuselage. Instead, the Type 00's surfacing is brutalist and monumental: all straight-cut sides and a blunt, arrogant nose pierced by only the narrowest of slits for headlamps. Presented in a darker hue than the Miami Pink of the show car, it would look menacing.
The real significance of those proportions lies in their active rejection of EV design orthodoxy. Electric motors are far smaller than internal-combustion engines, and batteries can be hidden in the floor, giving designers greater freedom to conceive new profiles and maximize cabin space. Most use that extra volume, yet the Type 00 still looks like it's packing a V-12 up front. This was an intentional choice by the designers: Unusually, they were able to create their ideal proportions unconstrained by an existing structure under the hood. The JEA, or Jaguar Electric Architecture, that underpins it came later and was engineered around the design. And although the Type 00 is a concept car, intended to embody the marque's new aesthetic direction, it was developed alongside the GT four-door grand tourer and two SUVs that will follow. The images that Jaguar has provided of a disguised GT being tested in the U.K. indicate that those striking proportions have not been softened much for the cars you'll be able to buy.
But will you want to buy them? When Jaguar leadership committed to the complete electrification of its range, it couldn't have foreseen that the market for electric vehicles of any type—luxury models especially—would be horrible right now. Porsche's pure-electric Taycan is incandescent to drive, but sales have slumped and the marque is considering putting internal-combustion engines back into future editions of such models as the Macan and the 718 that it had publicly pledged to electrify. Across Stuttgart, Mercedes has paused development of its MB.EA platform that would have underpinned its next generation of large luxury EVs, and it has retreated from its vow to electrify its entire range by 2030. The new Jaguar has already been delayed by a year, and when it finally goes on sale, it will face even more luxury electric rivals in a market that looming tariffs and trade wars over EVs may worsen further. There will be an all-electric Ferrari by then, and Ferrari's strategy of hedging its bets by continuing with hybrid and pure internal-combustion drivetrains alongside its new electric model might look prescient.
There are more people now that are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s that have money that should be your target customer.
Away from the din of social media, those who actually know what they're talking about make quiet, trenchant criticism of Jaguar's bold move. Andy Palmer faced similar decisions in his six years as CEO of Aston Martin and earned his Godfather of EVs nickname for pioneering the Leaf while global COO of Nissan. He remains a respected thought leader in the field.
'I can't think of anybody that has done this before,' Palmer tells Robb Report of Jaguar's abrupt reboot. 'It's almost unprecedented. We have to look outside the car industry to find a brand that's tried to reinvent itself so completely. And even then it is not easy to think of one that has said, 'Let's delete our history and use the same name to define a new history.' It is somewhat counterintuitive.'
'Jaguar as a British BMW didn't really work,' he continues. 'It hadn't set itself apart, and so it needed to move its brand position, and it needed product to go with it. I was also of the opinion that simply going fully EV in itself wasn't enough, given that everybody's going to go EV by 2035, so it needed to be something more than that. Jaguar is kind of at a crossroads. It was do-or-die. But the most expensive marketing you can do is taking your existing brand and building a new brand from it—because you've got to dismiss the old legacy and create a new one…. It's not 'Copy nothing,' it's 'Start with nothing.' … I probably wouldn't have gone as extreme.'
There is also risk in chasing the younger, hipper demographic reflected in that promotional film and targeted in the Jaguar rebranding. Millennials are more likely to move around their cities by driverless Waymo than in a huge electric Jag that they have to buy and park. The cohort might have money, but Jaguar's existing older demographic has more—and more desire for an expensive car.
'I've been in the car industry 45 years now,' says Palmer, 'and about every five years a product planner comes to you saying, 'We really want to go after these cool 20-year-olds.' But they are not the target you need to be looking at, and that is more true now than it has been over those 45 years. There are more people now that are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s that have money that should be your target customer, rather than 20-somethings who don't have money, don't have the need, and will probably look for tech first, in which case they're going to buy a Tesla or a Nio or a Polestar because their aspiration is Apple, not a Jag. Jaguar is seemingly walking away from a customer base that others are walking towards.'
JLR and its corporate parent didn't need to do any of this. They weren't forced to take the financial and reputational risk of a total rebranding. Marques—even the most storied—come and go, and that turnover will likely hasten in the tumult and uncertainty of the transition to electric propulsion. Jaguar might have quietly and respectfully slipped into abeyance after years of struggle, as Daimler, Rover, Triumph, and other great British names did. It might still, if this radical, unprecedented roll of the dice doesn't pay off. Ultimately only you—the buyers—will decide.Best of Robb Report
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