What is a Jaguar?

 My esteemed colleague Jack Yan, brand guru par excellence, publishes the yearly Autocade yearbook, an outstanding in-depth peek at vehicular trends. This season - to coincide with the release of his newest edition - I've asked him to contribute a blog about Jaguar's abrupt volte-face from his very informed perspective. His text follows:

    Jaguar Land Rover announced some time back that it didn’t see Land Rover as a brand any more. It would rather we think of Defender and Discovery as brands, just as do with Range Rover. Jaguar, it said, would no longer chase BMW and Mercedes-Benz volumes, but be something rather more exclusive. Britain itself would see its car-making numbers drop with ripple effects through the wider economy …

But is it that simple? While Range Rover has indeed existed for most of its history without Land Rover—for years it was part of Rover itself, before the green badge appeared on the grille as a form of endorsement—it’s hard to think of Defender and Discovery without their Land Rover roots. British Leyland tried marqueless cars from time to time: Maxi, Princess, even Maestro and Montego … and the only one that really graduated into marquedom was Mini. Parent company Tata’s “house of brands” is a gamble.

And Jaguar—can it really extend upmarket after years of being forced downmarket? Tata sees it as the next Bentley.

Certainly the new materials signal a massive departure from the past. We know Jaguar was forced to cancel its earlier XJ successor, in favour of a more ambitious EV, and it seems the new car won’t have much of a connection to the past.

Jaguar could only trade off its heritage for so long, something which only served to keep its median purchaser age high in the 1990s. The compact X-type of the late 1990s was, at best, an abbreviated Jaguar, almost a pastiche. It was only after the arrival of Ian Callum that Jaguar began having an eye on the future, and the last XJ was meant to signal a future in ‘beautiful, fast cars’. The brand and its symbols gently evolved: this was the same Jaguar history, but added chapters; the same storied past but packaged with greater modernity.

It was like that other British brand, James Bond, through the 1990s and early 2000s: Pierce Brosnan might be driving an invisible Aston Martin in his last outing, but rest assured, this was supposed to be the same cinematic James Bond that started in 1962.

Then came a reboot.

Jaguar is in the same boat. Its Callum design language has come to a close. It is time for a reinvention. The last time it did something like this was with the XJ-S in 1975. And those proved difficult to shift, not just because there was an OPEC embargo on.

The symbols are all new. The leaper appears with 16 horizontal lines, broken at places to form the sign of the cat. A 1980s video game motif? Or a signal to say that the ghost of Jaguar is here … but it’s not the Jaguar of old.

Maybe this is all right. It’s not a retro future then.

Then the logotype. Looking like Herbert Bayer’s Universal Alphabet, the Jaguar script is in a mixed upper- and lower-case, but all at the same height—think Bodoni No. 26. To heck with tradition. Childish or daring? Certainly a departure, with no Jaguar script ever looking like this.

Then there’s the new symbol of the two Js, one inverted (or it could be an r). Gone is the growler, the face of the Jaguar. Easy to draw for a child, like the three-pointed star of Mercedes-Benz. If the exclusivity that fashion brands convey is what Jaguar is trying to get at, then maybe there is a parallel with the linked Gs of Gucci or the linked Cs of Chanel. Except both came through a natural creative process. They evoke the era in which they were created. It’s difficult not to be cynical.

Jaguar promises its new limousine will be bought because of its styling, a car likely to have dramatic front and rear wings, eschewing the aerodynamicism of China’s Geely Galaxys, Zeekrs and Stelatos. Never mind the electric powertrain, it has a long bonnet. It’s going against trends, but then, has Jaguar—the true, innovative Jaguar from the 1940s to the 1960s—ever gone with them? It’s always blazed its own trail.

But Jaguar—which hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to quality—got away with a lot of it by being well priced. Not this Jaguar, priced at roughly double its current range’s numbers. Jaguar expects 85 to 90 per cent of its customer base to vanish. We expect the same customer base to be fashion-fickle, and that Jaguar isn’t on to the next XJ, but the next Aston Martin Lagonda. The wedge one. Super-exclusive but not as timeless as they might think.

All we can safely say, without seeing the product and the marketing mix, is that it’s a high-risk strategy. History isn’t on Jaguar’s side, but then, history has run its course for the brand. Indeed, to quote one of Jaguar’s former owners’ founders, history is bunk. And certainly, the Jaguar of 2026–7 doesn’t have much need for all that equity.