Jaguar Promises an ‘Elegant Sunset’ for Last Surviving Models

Jaguar hit the reboot button once again when it announced a new direction, new branding, and a handful of new cars in late 2024. The brand’s new identity is a little startling, to put it lightly, and a leaked memo suggests that even insiders aren’t convinced it’s the right direction. However, executives remain adamant that they’re pushing Jaguar in the right direction, and above all, they’re convinced that something had to be done.

Jaguar’s managing director Rawdon Glover told Autocar that Jaguar had reached “a pivotal point in its history.” Every car in its portfolio, and the platforms that they’re built on, needed to be replaced. In recent memory, the company has tried to align its range with BMW’s. The XE was aimed at the 3 Series, for example, while the XF was marketed as an alternative to the 5 Series. This approach failed to boost sales.

“Economically, the Jaguar model didn’t make sense,” Glover told the publication. He added that taking Jaguar further downmarket wouldn’t have made sense either. What’s below BMW in the pecking order, the likes of Nissan’s or Toyota’s luxury brands? Should Jaguar, whose resume includes the E-Type, really go after them? Instead, executives took the controversial decision of pushing Jaguar upmarket to peg it on roughly the same level as Bentley.

Up, up, and away, then, and Glover hinted that the cars in Jaguar’s pipeline will cost about twice as much as the models they’ll replace. The Type 00 concept unveiled in December 2024 previews what to expect from the next chapter in the company’s history. It’s massive, it’s electric, and it looks like nothing Jaguar has ever made. It’s built on a new architecture, and it should morph into a production model by the end of 2025.

In the meantime, Glover said that Jaguar plans “an elegant sunset” for the last few models it sells. We suppose that’s more poetic than saying “we’re sending everything to the guillotine!” though both metaphors are ultimately pretty vague. Its American website lists the F-Pace, the E-Pace, the I-Pace, the F-Type, and the XF as being available to build and reserve, but some of these are no longer in production. The brand no longer sells new cars in its home country of England, which is a little startling. We can’t remember the last time a major carmaker took a year off, but Jaguar hopes to use this break to its advantage.

“There’s no real playbook for that, because nobody else has done it before. It’s definitely been a really interesting challenge to take that on. We’re quite a long way through it. We will have this period now of ‘breathing space’ to really build the [new] brand, the awareness, the interest, before we actually start taking orders further down the track,” he said. We’re glad Jaguar is making the most of this situation, but keep in mind that the year off wasn’t planned. Jaguar was nearly done developing the next-generation XJ when former CEO Thierry Bolloré suddenly canceled it.

Glover also addressed the critics that claim Jaguar is forgetting about its current customer base by rebranding itself.

“One example [of criticism] being: ‘We are leaving our customers behind; we don’t care about our current customers,'” he said. “I can understand how that has been interpreted, because we’re basically saying Jaguar needs to attract a new audience. But that doesn’t mean to say we’re not interested in our current audience. Quite the opposite. [We] want to take as many of that current audience on that journey with us as possible.”

The catch, of course, is that current Jaguar owners who want to stay with the brand will need to spend twice as much on their next car.

Will they? It’s not impossible. Glover used the second-generation Land Rover Defender as an example. Everyone loves the original Defender, and it’s one hell of an off-roader, but anyone who has driven one will tell you it was pretty much a family-friendly tractor. The current-generation model is far more luxurious, exponentially more comfortable, and correspondingly more expensive. “We’ve tripled the volume and doubled the price point,” Glover pointed out, clarifying that the idea isn’t to triple Jaguar’s sales volume. “It’s an indication that these things can be done.”

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