Why Does The New Jaguar Type 00 Look Like A Concrete Shithouse? An Ex-Jaguar Land Rover Designer Explains

I spent the better part of my working time last week researching and writing a considered long form piece about the tumultuous history of Jaguar and how the Coventry car maker found itself in the unenviable position of having to totally redefine its brand in a last gasp attempt to stay in business. This was all in preparation of the reveal of the new Jaguar EV concept reveal tonight at Art Basel in Miami (my VIP invite got lost in the post).

As I blearily awoke this morning the portrait of Matt I keep hanging in my wall was angrily flashing its eyes at me, Thunderbirds style. “Bag Open. Cats everywhere. Get on it” He growled. He wasn’t wrong. Overnight the internet has done its thing and the new Jaguar Type 00 has leaked.

It appears British newspaper The Independent had received official images ahead of the reveal tonight under embargo. That post now appears to have been removed but the internet does not forget and here at the Autopian we were not under embargo anyway. Now I’ve had enough coffee to sink a battleship let’s have a look and see what we think.

The usual caveats apply: I’m going off limited information here – I have managed to glean a few extra details from various sources (I met a shady-looking guy in an underground car park in central Coventry) but specifics remain lacking. We don’t know the dimensions, and we’re going off studio images so can only talk about what they show us. And as usual, to really understand you need to see a car in the metal.

Here’s What We Could Have Won

A couple of weeks ago, the cancelled X351 Jaguar XJ leaked onto the internet. During my time at Land Rover, I saw this car back in 2018 and can confirm this is indeed, or rather was the EV XJ. Back when Mr. Tata was still alive every six months or so there would be a big board level presentation for him on upcoming products. At the time the Jaguar and Land Rover studios were still separate – Land Rover was at the main campus in Gaydon and Jaguar was tucked away on an industrial estate in Whitley. So it made sense to bring all the Jaguar stuff over to Gaydon. Some were finished hard models, some were clays. So I was privy to all the future production Jaguars and concepts. There was a J-Pace SUV to sit above the F-Pace (no problem in revealing this as it’s common knowledge) and everything else was as you’d expect. These cars were then cancelled as part of the revamp and one absolutely incredibly beautiful and exceptional proposal aside, nothing of value was lost.

The Side Profile

First, this is a heavy-looking car. We know it’s going to be physically heavy because it’s a big luxury EV. But Jaguar Type 00 looks visually very heavy – it has big wheels (I’m guessing 24”) for two reasons. First, big heavy cars need big brake rotors to stop them, even though regen does counter this to a degree. Secondly, as a car goes up in size you need to nudge other dimensions up including the wheels to make sure everything stays in proportion. As you go up in wheel size, on a road car this means the wheel arch opening is pushed further and further up relative to the bodyside. Consequently, the wheel arch openings start wrapping further around the wheel as the body side gets closer to the ground plane. On an SUV this isn’t a problem because the bottom of the bodyside (the rockers) should be higher up and more in line with the wheel centers. But on a road car, it can give the impression of the whole car sagging towards the road making it look heavy. Compare it next to a Rolls Royce Spectre, a car the production Type 00 will be a competitor for, and see how successfully it hides its bulk in profile.

Also in the side view, particularly in the bottom half, I’m seeing some Range Rover. The crisp shoulder line, the kick-up of the tail behind the rear wheel, and the feature line along the bottom of the bodyside all scream Range Rover. This is exacerbated by the verticality of the front and rear of the car – the new full-size Range Rover and Sport have sharply docked tails. I heard that the initial sketch of this car was done by Massimo Frascella before he departed for Audi. Frascella was McGovern’s right-hand man at Land Rover for decades before Ian Callum retired and McGovern used the opportunity to bring both the Jaguar and Land Rover studios together. So maybe that’s where this Range Rover influence comes from.

From The Top

Straight top-down views are normally a bit boring and not used for media shots because they don’t show an awful lot other than the roof and hood. Here we can see some longitudinal strakes over the passenger compartment. What purpose do they serve? Behind that is what looks to be the trunk. Judging by how much the opening is inset from the edge of the C pilar the intention must have been to keep the shut lines away from the edge, lest they end up with two panels messily meeting at ninety degrees like a Cybertruck.

You can see the rear track is significantly wider than the front – lesser commentators will give you some bullshit about how this makes the car look squat and muscular and like an animal ready to pounce. It’s a bunch of crap because you can achieve much the same visual trickery with clever surfacing. For me what’s slightly more concerning is it looks like the front and rear of the car are from two completely different vehicles. Once the back half gets past the wheels has a lot of what we design wankers call ‘plan shape.’ That is the bodywork tapers in towards the center of the car, like the hull of a boat. This means you don’t have bulky corners and helps give an impression of speed and sleekness. But in real life, you never look at a car from the top – it would have been better to try and dovetail the side a bit.

Compared to the back of the car the front appears to stop abruptly – again in front of the front axle it looks like they were so determined to get the wheels as far forward as possible they didn’t leave enough room for the bodywork to flow smoothly. Look at how quickly the hood/funk shut lines change direction. They’re forced into this awkward transition because they have limited space to turn and meet the inner part of the front lights. There’s a very visible ‘corner’ running across the width of the car just ahead of the front wheel arches which is at odds with the vast expanses of uninterrupted sheet metal at the back.

Rectangles. Rectangles Everywhere

The front and rear graphics are both made up completely of rectilinear elements. The small horizontal lighting graphics are simple and out of proportion meaning there are vast expanses of nothing below and between them. It all just feels so stark and rigid – nothing is radiused and there’s barely any curvature visible. This is partly a trick of looking at an image that is necessarily reduced in scale. I know on the actual car there will be a degree of curve present because horizontal dead straight lines appear to sag – something James Dyson found out the hard way because when he was attempting to build his own car he thought he knew better than professional car designers and didn’t hire any. But I’m digressing.

The straight lines continue inside. The hard-edged seats look like a bench that’s been yanked out of a Coventry bus station. The slats and strakes theme from the outside are replicated on the instrument panel upper. There are no visible screens or gauges, or indeed any controls whatsoever. I wouldn’t be putting my faith in a mind-control helmet designed by JLR so I assume there’s some concept car surprise and delight bullshit going on that we’ll find out more about later. It’s certainly not a leather and wood-lined comfort cocoon-like Jaguars of old. Like the exterior the interior is very sparse and spare – it feels like a high-tech medical waiting room in a sci-fi computer game. Except not all the visual assets have loaded in properly.

One of the great myths about EVs that I’ve done my best to dispel is that because there’s no bulky ICE engine and gearbox designers and engineers will have a lot more freedom to start getting wild with proportions and acres of interior space will be liberated.

This overlooks two things – firstly EVs still have a lot of crap to package. Motors can go on axles sure, but you still have control modules, onboard chargers, battery management systems, and all manner of black boxes to find room for. This is why smaller EVs don’t have much of a frunk, even if they are RWD like the Honda e. Secondly, the market is generally pretty conservative. The Jaguar iPace was about as revolutionary as it was possible to go in terms of volumes – and purchase price issues aside look how that faired. Judging by the cab rearward shape of the Type 00 I can only hope this thing has a huge frunk – because they’ve almost pushed the shape into caricature. There’s so much dash-to-axle and the roof line is so low. It’s a bit like when auto design students discover these characteristics for the first time and decide pushing them beyond the limits automatically makes a better-looking car.

We must remember this is only a concept. The actual production car will be a four-door GT. This is only a preview of the visual style of future Jaguar models. It’s certainly striking, but you’d struggle to call it beautiful. It’s also monolithic and slabby.

Next to a Rolls Royce Spectre it feels like an ill-considered sixties concrete tower block next to the Seagram building. Similar ideas and ethos but one is much more successful in terms of execution. Gerry McGovern got his love of Modernism from the rebuilding of Coventry after it was bombed flat in the war, but visiting the city now you’d be hard-pressed to recognize the optimism and hope that drove those concrete ideals. Let’s hope this brutal revamp is more successful, because there are a lot of jobs depending on it.

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