Jaguar takes wraps off ‘woke on wheels’

For those expressing faux outrage at the rebranding of Jaguar, or genuinely forlorn at the company’s ‘woke’ overhaul, things may be about to get even worse.

Images from Jaguar’s rebrand.

For those expressing faux outrage online at the rebranding of Jaguar or are genuinely forlorn at the “woke” overhaul of what the company calls a “reimagining” of this heritage brand, things may be about to get worse – or even better – depending on your perspective.

The word over the past week has been that when the dust sheets are lifted in Miami on Monday on the new prototype electric Jaguar – or design vision concept as they call it – the vehicle will come in a pink livery to illustrate the capital-D diversity credentials of the new brand.

Or as one female industry executive put it: “They, Jaguar, want me, a woman, to be one of their customers. So they are offering me a pink car? What is this? Barbie goes to Palm Beach?”

Of course this may be an industry wind-up in a notoriously backbiting trade. But such is the incredulity at what Jaguar is trying to achieve in its “reimagining”, folks are prepared to believe that the company could be crass enough to launch its new car in pink to present its accessibility to customers who aren’t ageing white men.

Or on the other hand if it doesn’t go ahead in pink, the claim would be that Jaguar executives may have had a word with themselves after being on the end of what they have condemned as “a blaze of intolerance”.

Copy nothing. #Jaguarpic.twitter.com/BfVhc3l09B

— Jaguar (@Jaguar) November 19, 2024

For many it isn’t just the inverted Js of the new “monogram” nor the juvenile font of the new logo nor the inferior version of the leaping cat that offended, it was the bombastic jumble of random words strung together to explain what Jaguar is trying to achieve: “A dramatic new visual language … powerful celebration of modernism … geometric form, symmetry and simplicity demonstrating the unexpected … striking through imitation and the ordinary … tonal building blocks presented with texture or movement … an expression and a signifier of a completed work that is a flourish or finishing touch …”

Elon Musk was not the only one left wondering whether we are talking about a car. Or indeed what Jaguar was talking about at all. Witless? Maybe. Humourless? Definitely.

Before the launch – and the two-year delay in the production schedule that was first announced during the pandemic – the doubters are already calling the electric Jaguar the “last chance saloon” and the last of the nine lives for a brand known in the industry as the Big Cat.

Do you sell cars?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2024

What we do know is that the new vehicle is a four-door GT or grand tourer. So think Bentley Continental but with two more doors. Or if you reckon Jaguar has an uncomfortable recent record of copying German cars then think Audi e-tron GT or the equivalent from Mercedes-AMG. The electric Jag will be priced in excess of 100,000 pounds and the company is now not a “premium” carmaker but a “luxury” brand.

And, in the words of the company’s veteran chief designer Gerry McGovern, the new vehicles will be “jaw-dropping”.

But existing or future Jaguar consumers can be forgiven for being confused about what new Jaguar is about.

Despite its claim to be breaking with the past, Jaguar insists on always drawing on its heritage. The model which will forever define Jaguar is the E-Type, Britain’s high watermark of automotive leadership but a vehicle first produced in the dawn of the Swinging Sixties. It is from that vehicle that Jaguar always promoted its brand and its models with the words sleek, agile and powerful.

That was not always the case under the ownership of British Leyland nor later when in American hands customers were getting a Ford with a Jaguar badge on it.

After its 2008 acquisition by Tata Motors, the Indian conglomerate brought in Carl-Peter Forster, an Anglophile German to revitalise Jaguar and its brands Range Rover and Land Rover.

Forster would always say that a Jaguar has to be fast and beautiful, that the company should never build a big Jaguar nor get sucked into the volume production game. After Forster left and his deputy Ralf Speth took over, Jaguar did both: building an F-Pace that dimensionally was a Range Rover in all but name; and chased volume by releasing the Jaguar XE, the “baby Jag”, a BMW 3 Series wannabe which was inevitably and ignominiously defeated at the hands of the Germans.

During this time, however, the company also produced the F-Type sportscar, a worthy successor to the E-Type; and the I-Pace, an award winning all-electric car, ahead of its time and rightly seen as an alternative to the Teslas coming out of the US West Coast.

Yet Jaguar never built on the success from 2018 of the I-Pace. The model is now going into retirement. By the time of the launch of the next electric Jaguar, the gap will have been eight years.

Jaguar’s ambitious commitment to becoming an all-electric brand by 2025 was always a bold call. The automotive gods have conspired against it because 2024 is seeing a pushback by the motorist and a waning in the pace of take-up of zero-emission cars.

And all this at a time of flux. Sir Ratan Tata, the architect of the acquisition of Jaguar Land Rover, has died and the British carmaker’s future under his half-brother Noel Tata is not certain. JLR’s chief executive, Adrian Mardell, was initially appointed as an interim. He has stayed on for more than three years but at 63 is unlikely be around to oversee the future of new Jaguar.

Does it matter whether the new electric Jaguars are a success? To a few thousand workers in the West Midlands, obviously yes. To what is left of Britain’s self-esteem in the global automotive industry, obviously yes, to go alongside the desired continuous success and successful transition to lower emission vehicles of the UK’s other luxury carmakers, Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin and McLaren.

And to JLR? If the Jaguar makeover is a disappointment and the billions spent on it are a write-off, it is a company which still has the fabulously successful and profitable Range Rover and Defender brands. Of course if the new vehicle revealed today knocks the critics out of the park and the order book begins to fill up rapidly then these last few uncomfortable days can be forgotten and not a few executive reputations will, like Jaguar itself, have been saved.

The Times