Why Jaguar Had To Blow Up Its Brand In Order To Save It

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