Despite their apparent insouciance cats are loving and loyal companions. When my special best little buddy Mr. Tigg crossed over in 2023 I was devastated; it was the first time in my life I suffered a heartfelt loss. Adrian Veidt’s only real friend was Bubastis, a large red lynx named after the ancient Egyptian sun-goddess, but the sociopathic Veidt callously sacrificed her in his attempt to kill Dr. Manhattan, part of his warped plan to bring peace to a world on the brink of Armageddon. What’s one more life next to the three million you took thirty-five minutes ago? Even I would have spared the cat.
Two weeks ago roughly the same number of idiots took to the internet to express their disgust at the twenty-five-second clip Jaguar released to launch their rebrand. What pricked their rage glands? A mostly harmless if puzzling montage of beautiful people in avant-garde clothing, parading around primary colored backgrounds while a series of Instagram self-help slogans splashed across the screen. It gave the impression of a perfume commercial without the mandatory shot of the Eifel Tower, or an advert from this week’s app-based fashion start up. What started out as genuine bafflement rapidly turned into an eye-rolling new front in the culture war, leading to some seriously vile and bigoted commentary from the sort of swivel eyed loons who have a secret folder labelled Magaret Thatcher on their hard drives. In their lager-addled brains all Jaguar needs to do is return to its role as a purveyor of traditional masculine cars for traditional masculine customers, and En-gur-land will rule the waves once more. I’ve got a newsflash for those mutton-headed bulldog botherers: the customers who bought those cars never existed in numbers large enough to support the company as a going concern.
Like Veidt’s precious Bubastis, the Jaguar these Churchill-fondlers are getting all misty-eyed over is an imaginary creature. There was a time when a Jaguar was a wood-paneled and leather-lined phallus on wheels with feral suggestion bursting out of every curved body panel. Iron fist, velvet glove, yadda yadda. But when this reality held true the company itself was more like poor old Mr. Tigg: an arthritic blind old tabby who pissed on the carpet. A paper tiger held together by the sheer penny-pinching autocratic will of its revered founder, Sir William Lyons. Before we get into dissecting what this all means now that we’ve seen the bloody car, we need to understand how Jaguar ended up in the position of having to blow up its brand to save it.
Humble Beginnings
Plain old William Lyons as he was then known started the Swallow Sidecar Company with William Walmsley in 1922. Walmsley built the sidecars, while Lyons concentrated on the administrative side of the business. To expand they began repairing and repainting cars and renamed the company the Swallow Sidecar and Coachbuilding Company. Their first rebodied car was the Austin 7 Swallow, a brightly colored two-seater that sold for £175 but with its unique body resembled something much more expensive. Demand meant relocating the company from their hometown of Blackpool (a seaside town north of Liverpool) to Coventry in 1928.
After the Second World War Lyons decided using the name SS was no longer a clever idea, so in 1945 the company was renamed Jaguar Cars Limited. Pre-war models went back into production as Jaguars, until in 1948 they were replaced by the Mk V, a lumbering bus powered by the existing Standard straight six that could just about wobble to 90 mph. Lyons had long wanted a luxury sedan that could top the magic ‘ton’ (100 mph) and that same year he finally had an engine powerful enough; one that would go on to define Jaguar for the next four decades: the legendary XK.
That engine along with two cars – the E-Type of 1961 and the XJ of 1968, did more than anything else to define what a Jaguar was. Fast, stylish but raffish. Solid middle-class bowler-hatted types drove upright and uptight Rovers. Horse and hound families drove a Rolls Royce, an Aston Martin, or a Range Rover. Jaguars were driven by shifty grifters; wide boys and villains who appreciated their combination of luxury and performance at a bargain price. Watch any British cops and robbers TV show or film from the sixties and seventies and there will be a Jaguar full of gangsters squealing away from the boys in blue. A Jaguar is a Guy Richie film on wheels.
The Rot Started Decades Ago
By the late sixties, the British motor industry at large was imploding. The government pressured various struggling British OEMs into an unwieldy round of consolidation that by 1968 saw Jaguar firmly ensconced within the bosom of the newly formed British Leyland. Although at the time Jaguar was profitable, Lyons himself was nearing retirement age and had no natural successor, so placing his company under the aegis of Leyland seemed to be the logical thing to do to ensure Jaguar’s survival.
We all know how that experiment in motor manufacturing turned out – the Leyland logo was not nicknamed the flying plughole for nothing. Jaguar was always an awkward fit within the mass market Leyland empire and so in 1986 it was floated off publicly. By now the Jaguar range consisted of one brand new model – the XJ40, and two crocks. The Series III XJ12 was a 12-cylinder third facelift of the original XJ from 1968, and the XJS which dated from 1975. Sir John Egan kept the company above water until November 1989 at which point Ford, attracted by the untapped potential of the company, decided paying £1.6 billion for it was a sound business decision. Unfortunately Jaguar, after years of non-existent investment was more of a basket case than Detroit realized. Newly installed chairman (and ex-Ford executive) Bill Hayden told Gavin Green in the October 1990 issue of Car magazine:
“I was given the usual presentation on what terrific progress Jaguar had made over the years, and was then shown around the factory. I was appalled. I am essentially a manufacturing man. I’ve been to car plants all around the world. Apart from some Russian factories in Gorky, Jaguar’s factory was the worst I’d ever seen.”
“The labour practices, the demarcation lines, and the general untidiness of the place: it was unacceptable. I think the workforce genuinely thought this was an advanced, acceptable factory. Perhaps they knew nothing different. Whatever, we will get it right.”
Despite pouring money into Jaguar, Ford never did get it right. First the XJ220 launch was all gong and no dinner: the promised V12 four-wheel drive show car became a two-wheel drive V6 and customers wanted their deposit checks back. After that debacle, Detroit squeezed out of Coventry a range of cloyingly retro cars designed around the idea of what Americans thought a Jaguar should be. The X-Type was unforgivably front wheel drive (although there were four-wheel drive versions) because it shared underpinnings with a Mondeo. The DEW98 platform that sired the Ford Thunderbird and Lincoln LS gave birth to the vagina grilled S-Type. The slick, ovoid XK8 could accommodate a pair of golf bags in the trunk but kept the XJS floor pan and had a ride height that wouldn’t trouble the hip joints of Florida retirees. Finally, the XJ40 was tarted up twice before finally being replaced with the brand new but superficially identical aluminum-bodied X350 in 2003. By the mid-2000s Ford themselves were in the shit and offloaded Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata in 2008 for £1.15 billion (about half what it paid), never having made any money on the company.
Tata taking ownership of both gave birth to the modern-day company we know as Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). Although the pairing of two iconic British car companies appears to make some sense on an emotional level, it makes less sense from a building cars point of view – because they make completely different types of vehicles. Nonetheless, modern platforms are capable of incredible acts of contortion – leveraging their expertise in aluminum construction JLR developed the D7 platform which on the Jaguar side of the business birthed a new compact sports sedan, the XE, and a second generation XF in 2015, and the F-Pace SUV in 2016. Lastly, the E-Type finally got a sort of successor with the F-Type, which replaced the XK in 2013. This flurry of new products including the electric iPace gave Jaguar its best year of sales in 2018 at just over 180k units worldwide (as a comparison that year BMW sold 2.5 million). Since then sales have fallen off a cliff, plummeting to just over 60k for 2022. So what the bloody hell went wrong?
The Problems
Two of the main problems have been brand positioning and products. Ford saw untapped value in Jaguar as a potential BMW competitor. In attempting to recoup their monumental investment they moved Jaguar into shark-infested volume waters. It didn’t work because the cars had too much Ford in them and their retro design didn’t appeal to a younger audience that hadn’t grown up with derring-do tales of Le Mans in the fifties. Tata continued this strategy but despite a step change away from the retro design direction thanks to Ian Callum taking over from Geoff Lawson as design chief in 1999, the cars simply weren’t competitive enough. They weren’t as light as their aluminum construction implied and the interiors offered nothing of the traditional Jaguar ambience. The iPace was one of the first full EVs from an OEM that wasn’t Tesla but it was built under contract at Magna Steyr in Austria so it never made any money. It was left to wither on the vine without any further investment or attempt to leverage its early mover advantage. They couldn’t get the CX-75 supercar into production for much the same reasons – a lot of the engineering had been contracted out to Williams so the economics didn’t stack up. The F-Type was oddly positioned – sized like a Boxster and priced like a 911 without the practicality of either. They titted about with various powertrains even inflicting the poor thing with a droning 2.0 liter turbo four, but it still failed to find more than about four thousand sales a year. And they never took it racing, which of all the times JLR pointed the corporate shotgun at their feet, this feels the most avoidable.
Jaguar has never had the sort of consistent, decades-long involvement in motorsport their German competitors have. There were the Le Mans wins in the fifties with the C and D-Type cars but away from the 24 hours these cars had little success. D-Types remain unsold and were converted into the road-going XKSS and they still couldn’t unload them. Remember my earlier remarks about Jaguars being cars for chancers? Cometh the hour, cometh Tom Walkinshaw, a hardheaded racer who thought rules applied to other people. He took the XJS into European touring car racing and then used that as a trojan horse to get Jaguar into Group C racing in the eighties. Their 1988 Le Mans win was celebrated in the UK like we’d won the soccer World Cup and by the same class of people. What price pitching the F-Type into GT3 racing as a works effort using purple, white and yellow as the team colors and then using that scheme as a springboard for high-performance versions of their road cars? The less said about the brief F1 foray the better – this was only ever a corporate branding exercise undertaken at the behest of Ford. Jaguar themselves had little to no involvement.
Under Sir William Lyons the company didn’t modernize because he would rather save a pound today than invest it and save two in the future. Ford thought the answer was giving their own platforms a set of clothes from 1968. They found out to their great expense it wasn’t. Tata invested in all new platforms and with the stunning Callum-designed X351 XJ finally broke free of the stylistic legacy of the 1968 original. It was bold and shocking because it had to be. The F-Pace is as good as it’s possible for an SUV to look – but was it the right product for Jaguar? In hindsight probably not. No matter how great it is, when your sister company in the next room is Land Rover you’re getting to the point of splitting semantic brand hairs.
The Past Is A Gift And A Curse
What constitutes a brand isn’t a fixed point or a single well you can keep pouring from. Jaguar won Le Mans a few times in the fifties, released a couple of legendary cars in the sixties, and then kicked back and said that’s our brand values sorted for the next seventy years. We don’t need to bother doing anything else. Pass me the port old boy. You don’t enrich and progress your heritage by releasing continuation cars from the distant past that no one under sixty-five gives a shit about, and that have about as much relevance to the road car range as a pair of Jaguar-branded socks. Which you can pick up by the way in the reception of JLR Classic when you go and collect your ‘new’ XKSS. Sure they took on Group C in the eighties but to what end? None of the full English breakfast thickos who found themselves getting a French sunburn in 1988 were buying a new Jaguar because the cheapest one cost nineteen thousand pounds and came with cloth seats and wheel trims. Le Mans wasn’t a Jaguar victory – it was another Churchillian Brits against the Dastardly Jerries victory.
War rhetoric and class issues aside, this points to a broader problem Jaguar has with its home audience. There’s a big disconnect between how British car enthusiasts see the Jaguar brand and how the rest of the world sees it. A curious disease infects the British mind, one that demands nostalgia because things were much better when we had an Empire. We’re strangled by an opaque class system and yet completely in thrall to it – King and Country. We recently appointed a German as head coach of the national soccer team, and the most important thing on the minds of mid-wit commentators was: would he sing the national anthem at games? No other modern European country is so insular.
Enter Gerry McGovern
With the departure of Ian Callum in 2019, Gerry McGovern took over as the chief designer of both Jaguar and Land Rover. McGovern is often portrayed by the automotive media as a slightly prickly and aloof character – full disclosure he hired me personally back in 2017 and I knew him a bit two years prior to that – so I can’t help but get the feeling a lot of the ire directed towards the Jaguar rebrand from some quarters was a desire to see the whole thing blow up in his face: a gotcha from automotive journalists.
Growing up in post-war Coventry McGovern is influenced by Modernism – not out of nostalgia but because it looks forward represents a time in history when design was about improving lives. He is not one for heritage or gimmicks; the little Jaguar cub silhouettes in the windscreen band of the E-Pace would never make it out of one of his design reviews alive. McGovern has always been forward-thinking and unsentimental–a look at his greatest hits demonstrates the man knows how to design a good-looking, modern car. This is the point that everybody clamoring for a return to tradition seems to miss, and I’ve made this point before: What resonates on nostalgia-obsessed social media does not translate into sales of cars in the real world. If it did, Jaguar wouldn’t be in the position they are in now. So anyone expecting the new Jaguar to hark explicitly back to the past was always going to be sorely disappointed.
McGovern talks a lot about ‘reductive design.’ Taking away that which is absolutely unnecessary and leaving only a clean, modern form language. You can see this in the progression of successive Land Rover models – compare the details and feature lines on the original Evoque to the latest L460 Range Rover. But here’s the thing – the latest Range Rover is still definitely a Range Rover because it has the proportions, silhouette, and character of one. It’s the sheer surfaces, the hidden-until-lit rear lights, and flush glazing that place it firmly in the here and now.
Further Thoughts On The Type 00 Concept
This reinvention of Jaguar was named Project Renaissance within the company. The three internal design teams were Jaguar, Land Rover, and Design Research (a sort of internal advanced skunkworks based at Warwick University). Each pitched against each other, and after a review at board level the Land Rover team won out. There was some internal strife as a result of this, leading to something of an exodus of the Jaguar design team to the new GM studio in Leamington Spa. But the proposals from the Jaguar team were iterative – newer versions of what had been done before, and this is something the JLR board was keen to avoid. They wanted a complete reinvention of the marque.
In attempting to break so deliberately with the past the new Jaguar needed to be absolutely stunning to shut the naysayers up. Cliché Miami pink color aside, the new Type 00 is devoid of warmth and crucially, movement. The sheer sides and rigid geometric features make the whole thing look blocky and static. There’s too little detailing – on a large car details do a lot of work disguising the bulk – so reducing the grill to a series of embossed horizontal lines in body color does little to help break it up visually. The proportions are verging on the cartoonish – the slide glazing is too shallow – and the passenger compartment needs puffing up to help balance out the sheer amount of car below the belt line.
Athleticism. Lightness on its feet. Movement. Muscularity. Grace. Danger. These are some of the adjectives the name Jaguar brings to mind – and none of them can be used to describe the Type 00 concept. It might sound corny but as a designer one of your jobs is to identify the positive connotations you want your brand to represent and exemplify them visually. This doesn’t mean applying them in the way it has been done in the past – and note none of them are meant to appeal to any one kind of customer. The trick is to capture and interpret these feelings in a new and meaningful way that resonates in the marketplace. It doesn’t mean pandering and redoing what came before. McGovern has talked about a modern sense of occasion for a younger, city dwelling affluent market – it bears pointing out that OEMs do not pull customer archetypes out of their assholes. They have whole departments dedicated to market research. The lens to view this new Jaguar is not as a car, but as a luxury consumer good. Speaking to a crowd at the launch event in Miami, McGovern said “Some may love it now, some may love it later and some may never love it. That’s what fearless creativity does.” In other words, a man who is not afraid of ruffling feathers expects to ruffle a few feathers.
Just over twenty years ago television executive Ronald D Moore presented five minutes of new footage from his reimagined Battlestar Galactica series at a fan convention. The reception from the fans was decidedly chilly. The recasting of Starbuck as a woman had these die-hard bores booing. Eventually one asked Moore outright if he would entertain their wishes to turn the reboot away from his grimdark vision and back towards the earnest, corny look and feel of the original series. No, Moore told them. He had his own ideas for what he wanted to do. Take it or leave it he told them.
Appeasing the loudest voices in the room isn’t a good idea because they are never going to be satisfied. It’s no surprise that the wrong sort of people were upset with the Jaguar rebrand because Jaguars traditionally appealed to the wrong sort of people. The Type 00 is not what they wanted – but going on what we’ve seen so far I’m not sure it has the visual appeal for anyone to want it.
The reimagined BSG is now feted as one of the greatest television series reboots ever made, however.
All photos from Jaguar unless otherwise noted
Quite a bit parallel to the American muscle cars.
The nostalgia is there, but nostalgia doesn’t equal a market. Fortunately, for the Big Three, the have pickup trucks to fill the coffers.
And as the old saying goes, there’s no such thing a bad PR. Jaguar is being talked about more now than in a long time.
I’ll hold my judgement until the first production representative prototype is rolled out vs dissing the sketches and renders.
The Challenger, before it died was selling over 100k units a year.
Yeah it was selling better than ever, really. They should have spent some of that $50 billion horde of cash on at least keeping that and the Durango up to date.
My thought with the marketing campaign was the same. “Non-car people are talking more about Jaguar now than they have in the last decade.”
Understood that the “traditional” Jag buyers we envision don’t exist in the sort of numbers to support a brand anymore. That much is clear.
The question is whether this new vision will appeal to the cast of Love Island, for I imagine that demographic is what they’re aiming for.
It might, for an Instagram minute. And that is the problem as I see it. This concept is like the Cybertruck – outrageous enough to get noticed, practical enough to get adopted, but limited in appeal to “Look At Me” types that will soon move on to the next photo op.
The CT has the very large advantage of being a pickup truck, sold in the US, which is about as lucrative of a market as exists in the automotive industry, so even a limited adoption equates to a lot of money. jaGuar seems to be going for a much smaller market, where you need genuine success to pay back the investment.
I think they exist. They just know they can get more from the Germans and even Lexus. The interiors on the last Jags are abysmal. Meanwhile, Land Rover interiors are what all the other luxury SUV (or even aspirational mainstream SUV) interiors aspire to match.
Yup, that a rebrand and rebuild was needed is obvious. That this rebrand and rebuild is needed, or even desired at all is much less so. I am not a marketing professional, but it seems to me that the target market for new jaGuar is not really people who buy cars at all.
It will be popular with all of the same people in Miami, Hollywood, and Mediterranean enclaves that currently purchase G-Wagons and the like. IMO, it will be enough of a hit, to make all of this noise worthwhile.
Doubtful; those folks are going to keep buying what they’re already buying. I think simply letting Jaguar die is the smarter option.
They are trying to appeal young rich influencer buyers.
C’mon, everybody is doing that. Damn, some BMW have a selfie camera! Let them try.
Sometimes I try to imagine how these people will be when old (60+).
It will be a really strange time to be alive…
Being quite removed from the buyers Jag seems to be chasing, are they at least reacting positively to all this? Car campaigns with aspirational beautiful people in expensive clothes is nothing new, it’s just the campaign seems poorly done and derivative, although I’m fully in agreement that Jag can’t just keep chasing the past (and they’ve done plenty in previous revivals that shows they generally understand that).
Watchmen and BSG references. Transmetropolitan on his bookshelf. More and more I’m learning I want to hang out with Adrian.
The question is do I want to hang out with you.
Spoken like a true goth indeed….
Visually I think it looks like a bad ass robot fist that wants to smash through everything in its way. And, if I think of the attitude of the wealthy status bro’s and kardash-i-karens that are swiftly becoming our new ruling class, that seems to line up well with their approach to just about everything. I think it has the potential do well with brutal awful people, and those are the ones with means to buy this thing.
I think they should have at least one model that is exactly that. The D-Type and XK-SS give me funny feelings in my pants. An affordable lightweight sports car derived from either while maintaining this tradition would amazing.
Key words in bold. Jaguar hasn’t built such a car for half a century.
It has the road footprint of a Range Rover and mass almost as hefty, yet is marketed as a “sports car”. This is not your grandfather’s C/D/E-Type, this thing is a bloated monstrosity.
At close to 4,000 lbs, with all the bloat of a premium SUV, I wonder why…
All style, no substance.
No. Not when they’re competing internally with Land Rover as well as competing with everyone else who has the same type of overpriced, overweight, luxury vehicle available.
Verging on?
Exhibit A:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nviB2Rlm-uY
Exhibit B:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-Bj-7b0rC4
Granted, so too are the D-Type, E-Type, and XK-SS I cherish so much. The difference? The 00 is a Land Rover SUV dressed in drag as a sports car, while the aforementioned are actual sports cars. They’re not fooling anyone.
A bargain can also be a relative bargain, and not necessarily an economy-priced car. The X300 variant of the XJ12 was half the cost of the MB S600. Shoot, the launch brochure for the X300 even hits the value for dollar argument, which seems out of place, otherwise, for a luxury item.
They didn’t understand the concept of Veblen goods.
I’m opposed to their proliferation. I want their inverse: goods that offer immense value per unit of currency.
Consider that in 1961, the E-Type coupe went for £2,097. The average wage in Britain was roughly £15 per week for the working man, working an average of 42 hours a week. 5,800 hours of work at the average wage bought a man what was at the time the fastest production car on Earth. Not at all cheap, but definitely on the edge case of attainable. Sort of like a Corvette to an American today in terms of labor required.
In an era of hypercars, the fastest production cars on Earth will take 20x more hours of work at the average wage. The Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut costs £2,300,000, while the average wage is £18.64/hour, so about 123,000 hours of labor to afford. You’ll never have that in your lifetime unless you’re born into wealth.
To get back to an apples-to-apples comparison, consider the bloated Jaguar F-Type at £77,900. About 4,200 hours of work, so in that regard it is comparable, even significantly cheaper, but you’re not getting the fastest car on Earth. It’s objectively faster than the E-Type in all metrics, but you’re still driving a bloated 2-ton pig that’s roughly as long and as wide as a Range Rover.
The sorts of svelte, lithe, agile machines of the past are not available to the masses today at an affordable cost, for the most part. And if you want something of the sort that can also play with the fastest cars on Earth, it won’t be attainable in multiple lifetimes.
There’s an opportunity to overturn some apple carts here. Which is what the original E-Type did.
That said, at least we have kit cars like the Radical SR3. THAT is a performance bargain. Cheaper than an F-Type and will run circles around it. But you’ll need the tools and work space.
But very few people buy cars based on their outright speed anymore – including car fans. I don’t want a Jesko and I also don’t desire an F-type.
I want a car that feels fast but can also transport me, the kids, and a few suitcases while looking good and not breaking the bank. The 1960s Mark II is what I want, and that car probably made them a lot more money than the E-type ever did. The problem is that any manufacturer can offer good design and ample performance nowadays; in the 1960s they did not, which left room for the Alfa Romeos and Jaguars.
I’ve seen several people say it’s similar to the RR Spectre. That’s a £350k + car, so I agree, this could be seen as a relative bargain at 1/3 of the price.
I was at a funeral yesterday in Birmingham (just 20 miles from JLR in Coventry) so of course conversation at the wake turned to WTF are Jag playing at?
My Jag-owning brother is bemused, and has no idea what car to buy next. Certainly not a Jag they don’t have any cars to sell, and also seem pretty sure they don’t want to sell to the people who are currently customers.
I still miss Tribble (hastily renamed when we found out that she was pregnant and about to fill our house with furry offspring), my psychotic tortoise-shell longhair. 20 brilliant years of being hit in the face to wake me up at cat-breakfast time. Also my dining companion for my best Christmas ever: me, my cat, the two other cats I inherited, and a turkey big enough to feed a dozen people. We had fun that year.
Wonderful stuff! Adrian, you are a gem.
I realize this is a Colonial POV, but I prefer Jags from the Ford era. Somehow they are imbued with a feeling of reliability that may or may not be real, but it’s there nonetheless.
That being said, the brown XJS from the year of my birth is Frakkin’ awesome. One of the best-looking sedans ever made.
I never understood the anger over the Ford mechanicals in many of them. To me, it was the best of both worlds – British design with American internals. Isn’t that what Shelby did?
Funny how people accept things like the Pantera but not Jags. I guess the exteriors weren’t wild enough maybe?
The Ford mechanicals were comically poor. All the bushings, bearings, and suspension shot at 160,000klms, the engine (3.0 v6) grenaded itself shortly after- apparently that knock is a common issue in these engines. Sure the car looked good (while it was on the lift) but it was mechanically shit. Go pick up a cheap x-type (they’re readily available) and see what misery awaits. You’re truly better off buying a Camry as it will ride just as smooth except for much longer.
Ah, so it’s Euro-Ford stuff, not American. I see.
The troubles mentioned absolutely are American Ford of that era (especially the suspension troubles), and a large part of why to this day I won’t even consider a Ford that’s not an F Series or a Mustang.
Ya as someone who’s owned numerous other Ford’s, this is right on brand for them
That describes pre Ford Jaguars too.
Pre-Ford Jags were much, much, worse.
My understanding is one of the big problems with the V12 was the distributors – located slack dab in the center of the valley of the V – fried from the copious heat.
EVERYTHING fried in the heat on those. From electronics to gaskets.
I wonder how well those would work on an Atkinson cycle. It would make less power but what power made would be done so more efficiently so between less power and higher efficiency it would make a lot less heat while also being buttery smooth.
Nobody in the market for a V12 anything gives a Tinker’s Damn about efficiency. If you care about that, you are buying the wrong car to start with.
The main issue was that they crammed a V12 into an engine bay meant for an I6 that was designed in a country with a cold, clammy climate. So nowhere for the heat to go given the bay was jammed full of engine, especially when driven in a country that very much does NOT have a cold, clammy climate most of the time. And the exceptionally crappy electronics of the day that couldn’t deal with the heat.
Nobody in the market for a V12 anything gives a Tinker’s Damn about efficiency. If you care about that, you are buying the wrong car to start with.
They do if the alternative is no V12 at all. If increasing efficiency at the expense of some power means V12s continue to live I don’t see why that’s not a good thing. With modern engine management the power might even go up from the original.
Extrapolating from Toyota’s M20A-FXS I4 2.0L 150HP/139 ft lbs Prius engine a 6.0L V12 might have 450HP and 417 lb⋅ft, much better than the original 318HP and 336 lb⋅ft of the late 80’s HE engine.
The main issue was that they crammed a V12 into an engine bay meant for an I6 that was designed in a country with a cold, clammy climate.
I dunno, the V12 had issues in the XJS too which was a car designed for that V12.
Seek help. 🙂
Nah. I’m terminal. But in a good way.
Where?
They do – filling up is time-consuming and unglamorous. And rich people do not necessarily enjoy wasting money; I have never met a Rolls-Royce owner who doesn’t complain about the gas mileage.
I genuinely find the X-type and S-type vile in appearance – tacked on disproportionate Jaguar design cues; the Mondeo and LS both look a thousand times better in my eyes.
The Type 00 doesn’t seem fresh or interesting.
It very much reminds me of a stretched Scion Fuse concept from 20 years ago.
I liked the Fuse concept. I do not like this one. Not only don’t I want it now, I can’t see myself wanting one in its drastically depreciated state in six years.
Oh man oh man just a terrific write up again! I really do relish these when they come out, Adrian. I honestly would love to read more design criticism from you on a wider array of products.
Anyhow, something that really stands out to me is the insertion of the brand doing this at Art Basel/Design Miami. I was there to show work last year and… well it’s certainly a vibe. I had a great time, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a very very different world, playing to a quite niche but moneyed market.
In all honesty, I find it to be going too close to that unapproachable art-market vibe, which is also a market that has been shrinking based on auction sales all year. So much of it seems to be based on superficial type without much actual solid product underneath it, and it’s also notoriously flash-in-the-pan kind of stuff where the art, the design, the taste doesn’t matter as much as the cost. In that context, maybe they will actually have a short hit on their hands…
Sadly nowhere other than this hive of scum and villainy recognizes my literary genius.
So the Autopian is now Mos Eisley? Sweet! I’ll totally fit in now!
I can see the the Bentley Speed Six “Blue Train Special” in the silhouette of the 00.
The Speed Six is beautiful in its purposeful menace: it is absolutely peak super-villain-about-town conveyance.
There’s another Speed Six that can also fill that role, except this one was built by a bunch of psychopathic clowns in a shed in Blackpool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PE66X078Hk
Never underestimate the power of men in sheds.
Which definitely sounds like something men in sheds quietly mumble to themselves as they watch porn.
Hence the phrase “woodshedding.”
Having driven a Lotus clone* built by two men in a shed, I never will: that thing was scary-fast.
*1976 Dulon—former Formula Ford racer shortened & modified to become an SCCA Solo 2 car
Whereas the TVR Speed Six is more congruent to Jaguar’s heritage.
I had joked that it looked like a Temu air conditioner from the back but then someone said it looked like it’s made out of LEGO and damn if that’s not all I can see now. It actually outright explains some choices – no rear window because they didn’t have clear versions of the slanted blocks, for example.
But the real problem with Jaguar that is their branding has been kind of boom-then-bust. You’ll get an exciting statement vehicle, a break from the past and a bold push forward (XK, E-Type, X351 XJ) and then it just kinda sits there for a decade. What was once bold and exciting is dated, the company stagnates, and then it needs a big statement again after 10-15 years because they just let their new ideas sit instead of taking that momentum and continuing to build on it.
I love X351. The problem as ever is people only want to buy them second hand.
Kind of the problem with letting it sit though, isn’t it? If someone can’t tell the difference between this year’s model and one from five or ten years ago, it’s more likely they’ll think “well might as well buy it used and save a couple dollars, it’s not like they changed anything.”
Given that it’s a Ford-era design, Ford should’ve damn well kept it. It was a really nice Jaguar but would’ve been an absolutely brilliant Lincoln Town Car with the only change being the grille texture.
LOL-ing at the cost differential between the Jag and the Panther platform Town Car. Those Lincolns cost the manufacturing equivalent of pennies to build, by comparison.
And it showed in every possible way. Baffling that people think those heaps are “luxurious”. I have way to many miles in them thanks to Hertz having a sense of humor when it comes to the term “upgrade”.
I have long said nobody should have to drive a Panther unless they are wearing a uniform and getting paid.
No argument. I got that out of my system with the family heirloom ’99 Crown Vic. Not a good car, other than parts are cheap and they’re relatively durable.
They are *aggressively* engineered to a price.
And the kind of glitzy, cheap luxury a Town Car provides is not actual luxury, merely a poor man’s idea of luxury. Or an old person’s. Either way, they’re hunks of junk and I do not get the affinity.
Things that warm the cold dark hearts of fleet managers, and should be of relatively little concern to anyone who actually cares about driving enjoyment.
Much like how Donald Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man.
I really don’t envy anyone who’s tasked with turning Jaguar around right now. My honest opinion is that it’s probably better to just let it die and start an entirely new brand. I feel the same way about Lotus.
Considering how well Geely have done with Volvo, it’s staggering how they’ve fucked up Lotus. But I called it a year or so ago when I wrote that Lotus Can-Am car piece.
Without insider info, my impression was that the success of the mashup with Volvo is due to the way the buyout was structured, giving Gothenburg a healthy autonomy. I think the Volvo deal was also different because it was the first real Chinese foray into Western markets via a brand acquisition. By the time they got to Lotus they had more swagger and less willing to compromise with their local partners.
As it stands at the moment, Lotus is essentially two companies – the one making the EVs with its studio in Coventry (previously the Geely studio) and the traditional part of the company still in Hethel. Make of that what you will.
A modernized electric Lotus 11 size/style car, a svelte, nimble streamliner, would have really captured my attention. It wouldn’t have cost much in materials to build, would have been true to Colin Chapman’s ethos, as an EV could have cheaply been fitted with peak power appropriate for much heavier and more expensive vehicles, would have had acceptable range on a small/lightweight/inexpensive battery(< 30 kWh), and would have above all created a new niche that no one has touched, a niche that either would have sank or swam.
Think Corvette acceleration, Elise handling, Messerschmitt operating costs, for a not much more than BYD Seagull or maybe slightly less than Dacia Spring price, in an EV package that is forward thinking. In the process, you give up all the bells and whistles(roll-up windows, no infotainment, only heating and no AC, no sound deadener, no radio, just the bare minimum safety to pass, no carpet, you won’t fit if you’re obese, ect), but so what? Regarding performance, it would be great value for the money, and that is what Lotus has been about in the 1950s and 1960s when it made Elites, Elans, and Europas. The car needs to be something younger people can afford, and if they have to give up so much, they need to get something in return that is compelling enough to entice them.
Consider that Alan Cocconi’s 1,900 lb TZero with LiIon batteries and 150 kW power, could do 0-60 mph in 3.6 seconds. This was in 2003, built on a Piontek Sportech kit car, using batteries with half the energy density of those available today, having crap aerodynamics, and getting a 300 mile range at 60 mph on a massive(at the time) 50 kWh pack. This was the drive system technology licensed to Tesla for the creation of the Roadster.
A 150 kW EV drive system with sufficiently power dense batteries, say 25-30 kWh of them sized/selected to handle 300 kW peak(necessary for fast recharge times), in a tiny Ginetta G4 sized coupe of about 1,500 lbs, a CdA value to compete with Aptera, with front and rear double-wishbone suspension, RWD, 50/50 weight distribution, would be bloody amazing. Range could be 200 miles at 70 mph, maybe 80 miles of city driving in the middle of a Swedish winter, and 25-30 miles being flogged around a race track with a 0-80% recharge time of under 5 minutes at a Tesla charging station by virtue of its small battery.
The trick is getting it to pass the bare minimum safety standards, and no more. That would be a lot of car for the money if the price came in around $20,000-25,000USD.
If it swam, everyone else would have to spend years scrambling to catch up as sales of their more bloated/high-margin performance vehicles were cannibalized by what could be one of the cheapest cars available at all, because this poor person car can run circles around the 6-figure exotics on a race track. And the amount of value such a “penalty box” would offer for the money, primarily to enthusiasts, would be impossible to ignore, and they might look to it instead of more expensive options.
I think the problem with that is just, well, Jaguar is an excellent name for a car brand. Even if a new Jag isn’t connected to the old Jag, “Jaguar” as a name has a ring to it that can’t really be replaced.
The biggest mistake of the rebrand, I’d argue, is de-emphasizing the kitty, because it’s an evocative image plus people just like cats.
It’s a cool name, but I have seen or heard absolutely nothing about this car in any non-automotive channels since the debut. Granted I’m not as plugged in as I could possibly be, but I remember when Rivian recently showed their budget models I was hearing about them absolutely everywhere. I think people just like new things and new brands in general. Jaguar is a very, very old brand, and I wonder if they don’t carry a bit of that “grandpa car” image. I think a completely new brand (call it Lyons or something, idk) would’ve helped this car garner more attention.
Rivian invited a load of tech and EV influencers and none of them questioned the veracity of what Rivian was showing them, which was a pair of untouchable hard models.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240312215337/https://www.theautopian.com/the-rivian-r3x-is-not-a-retro-design-and-isnt-a-golf-a-delta-integrale-or-a-lada-niva-so-stop-saying-it-is/
I think that is because Rivian pulled off the very difficult feat of inventing a segment, the EV adventure vehicle. And they did it very well with high quality mechanical, interior, and electronics. They have cred, something Jaguar lost around 1975.
It’s getting attention – not all positive attention, mind you, but people are taking about it – but that’s not the problem of the name.
A couple of weeks ago I had an XF as a courtesy car while my i3 was being MOTd (a more bizarre owners car to courtesy car swap you’d do well to find). I felt I’d aged 25 years just by getting in it, it’s SO much not my kind of car, although it did remind me of when a friend was an engineer at JLR and I was a student and he’d give me lifts back home for the weekend from Coventry in a camo’ed up S-Type diesel.
I agree. My sister’s Bronco has a stupid animation of a horse on the infotainment screen when you turn the car on. It serves no purpose but to remind you that you’re in a Bronco (and you’re a tough, rugged individualist!), but it works.
It makes you sit there and wait in the fucking winter for the dumb animation to finish so you can get at the controls…
I was thinking about this the other day. There are precious few car brand names that are actual English words AND not someone’s last name. Jaguar, Rover….and Saturn?
There’s also Lucid, which remains kind of a weird name for a car. I think Karma counts as being adopted by the English language by now?
If we’re throwing in dead brands we’ve got Mercury, since it’s a planet and an element. And Meteor and Monarch, though those are some deep-cut Canadian references. Panther and Triumph are also in there.
I’m curious – how tough is it to continue on a design path like this and NOT resort to nostalgia at some point? Especially right now when nostalgia rides really high with consumers, even for periods they didn’t personally experience.
Obviously, McGoven has a vision fairly unlike anything else out there, but how likely is it that the eventual car or whatever will have “heritage” features of some sort due to others at Jaguar, concerns about short-term marketability, etc. Which may then serve to, by a thousand cuts, doom the overall reinvention?
This is the point I was trying to make. For the customers they are going to be courting – nostalgia doesn’t resonate. They’ve tried and tried in the past and it just doesn’t work because Jaguar’s heritage is built on some pretty shaky foundations. The new direction comes from the board, so it’s unlikely there will be a course change now.
Do you think there’s a danger of some sort of consensus that “the headlights need to look like cat eyes” or “add bulges just angular this time” emerges in the design language that then slowly pulls Jaguar right back to where it was?
No none whatsoever. I know that this is the design direction, and the production car will follow this design language very closely. The prototypes are out on the road, so it’s not going to change now.
I’m convinced the nostalgia for traditional Jaguars is the same shit that led to Brexit and is why the UK (particularly England) is so angry and fucked.
A yearning for a time the people feeling it have no recollection of and was actually really shit to live through or never fucking existed; ‘Blitz spirit’, ‘We’ won the war, all living upstairs in period dramas, we had an empire.
Whatever Jaguar needs to do to survive, I’m certain separating themselves from this English disease is absolutely vital.
Having not watched the promo spot, I just look at the car as an abstract product. I agree with Adrian that it’s not that this car isn’t Jaguar. I’m not particularly convinced this car would fit under ANY brand moniker.
The proportions, as mentioned, are just…wrong. I have 0 design experience and this car looked like it’s out of a 90s sci-fi video game when they purposely designed cars with cartoonish proportions to look “futuristic”.
Maybe the actual production model will stick the landing, cause the concept certainly doesn’t.
Maybe the concept 8s just to keep Jag at the front if people’s minds (all publicity is good publicity) for the next year or so while they sort out actually building something. If they showed what they’re ACTUALLY going to produce, by the time it hits dealerships, it’s old news.
The design will appeal to social media and reality TV influencers, and therefore will gain credibility with their followers. It fits right in with the “aesthetic” (if you can call it that) of excess that those constantly push. “Style” with absolutely no substance. It’s genuinely tasteless and bland, yet there’s so much of it that it makes an impression… of a sort.
Jaguar has to gain an audience for its brand somehow if it’s going to survive; I can’t fault them for throwing virtually anything at the wall and seeing what sticks. If they want to exist in the luxury car segment, then the quickest way to it is quite likely the faux-wealth and excess of the TikTok and reality-show crowd in order to get a following. They’ll get sales to, well… the marks with more money than sense who want to hitch themselves to an image. Do it well enough and it will keep the lights on and even turn a profit because the particular buyers they’re attracting will spend excessive amounts of money because their whole image is about spending excessive amounts of money and living an excessive “lifestyle”.
It’s essentially prostitution to keep themselves fed. The company can whore themselves out for a while, make some cash, and hopefully leave it all behind in a decade or less by re-working their marketing image and settling down in the market of upscale suburbia — once more selling to lawyers and dentists and doctors going through mid-life crises.
You’re not wrong that the rot started aeons ago.
But looking at JLR group right now, especially their engineering group, you can see the damage done not just by Ford but by BMW (with LR) before it. Just look at the age groups within the JLR group’s engineering and production – you’ve the “under-30” and the “over-50” group with nary in-between. There’s a whole generation missing from that company that was either fired, found “redundant”, or simply there were no hirings for a 20-year period.
I did a quick search to find a quote from BMW to the effect that they had some serious culture pain from their time with Land Rover and the culture of resisting change (combined with traditional British bureaucracy).
JLR did themselves a dirty by developing an independent platform for each of their vehicles with wildly different manufacturing techniques and only now just slowly trying to consolidate. And, here we are, with a new Jag that’ll need a bespoke platform.
The F-Pace might have been deemed a “mistake” – but it was one with the potential to be a mistake on par with the Cayenne/Macan, that is, one with decent sales numbers that keeps brands afloat. And would let them the freedom to do whatever they wanted with the rest of the lineup.
Jaguar can spin this how they want, but they’ve not the cachet (yet) to claim they’re Aston Martin’s equal on value – let alone adjacent a Rolls/Bentley.
I mean, they still can’t shed the reputation for lack of quality that they’ve spent decades earning (and reinforcing).
BMW wanted Land Rover for their SUV expertise. Once they had what they wanted, they off-loaded it.
With regard to the engineering experience within JLR, the short answer is for a long time they employed engineering staff as contractors – and this suited both sides. Ultimately JLR decided getting rid of highly paid contractors was a good way to save money – and they didn’t want to offer them permanent jobs. So a lot of institutional knowledge walked right out the front door, and JLR thought it could replace them with grads thrown in the deep end.
Knowing them, I’m sure they’ve still contractors in spades – ones with near-zero ownership as I’m sure JLR recycles them on a regular basis, as they don’t seem to trust anyone outside of that >50 group to make decisions.
But since it wasn’t being used, Chevrolet decided to Goebbel it right up.
It was the reich move.
So when is Chevy Goring to use it again?
If the concept had the front length reduced by 1/3, large round headlights and wheels that didn’t poke out it would look approximately 9,001% better. RIP Mr. Tigg
So this may be a brilliant, forward looking reinvention? The question is will Jaguar survive long enough to see the fruits of it’s reinvention?
The LR side of the business keeps it all above water very handsomely. So they have some breathing room.
“Athleticism. Lightness on its feet. Movement. Muscularity. Grace. Danger”
Someone please write a spy novel about Grace Danger. I’m sure Netflix would be interested in the adaptation- you’ve already written the tagline
Think I went out with her tbh.
Sounds like a memorable ride on the Crazy/Hot curve.
Up to seven years ago sales were increasing year on year. We’re only seeing the fruits of the reinvention now. The work started back in 2019 when the XJ was cancelled.
Tell us how you really feel, Adrian. I love it. This is the kind of unfettered, in-your-face writing that will keep me a member of this site for as long as I keep reading it. When I saw the first photos released yesterday pre-launch, my first thought was, “this is way too far out there.” The whole dash filling up when you start the vehicle? That’s a hard no for me. Great look for a concept, but in a production car? Never. And that thing down the middle of the cabin, with the travertine in the back? Pure dreck. I hope the crew at JLR gets something sorted out before production. Even though I’ve never owned one, I’d hate to see Jaguar die.
I’m basically unemployable anywhere else.
I lost my beloved old guy Mongo in 2023, after 18 years of drools, smelly regurgiburps, codependency, and supreme lapcattery. He was a lump of a majestic stallion of a cat.
Mr. Tigg was a little shithead who used to claw my legs and demand to sit on my lap all the time. He would also stubbornly refuse to eat his own food if there was people food being cooked. He made it to twenty and I still miss him terribly.
President Franklin Delano Kittyvelt’s 20 year term as President of the United Kitties ended in April this year. Right up until he died he was demanding food and attention. They always seem to take a piece of us with them when they go. Sorry for your loss, buddy.
Thank you. Mr. Tigg was a street cat no one wanted. Probably why we became best friends.
My condolences for the loss of your President.
By the end, he was such an infirm shithead he’d try to climb into my lap, come up short on the jump, but dig his claws in as if he still had any chance he’d scramble up into my lap. He did not, but that never stopped him from taking the opportunity to leave ten bloody pinpricks in my legs. Or do his fatclimb into windows, ruining the wall below. What a guy.
Old cats are special. Sorry about Mr Tigg. We had a bruiser who lived to about 21. He died 10 years ago and I still think about him every day. He taught me a lot about wisdom, poise, and leadership.
Those fkn cats, man. We don’t deserve them.
can we please get a wallpaper res of the “jagsplosion”?
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