► Jaguar’s Type 00 prototype meets its ancestors
► Four-door EV’s handling in focus
► Production model will be unveiled in September 2026
Jaguar is stoking the fires of the hype machine once again, priming the production version of its Type 00 concept for launch in September.
As part of the car’s development and, indeed, the entire Jaguar reset, its engineering team spent time driving classic Jaguar models like the XK120, E-Type, and various XJs to find out ‘what would make the new luxury GT a true Jaguar.’
Naturally, when the car in focus has around one thousand horsepower and three electric motors, rear-steer and air suspension with twin-valve active dampers, there’s a heck of a lot of additional technology that this Jaguar has over its illustrious predecessors.
The team are very keen to point out how much time and effort has been spent on developing and engineering the new car to handle like a Jag, with this experience allowing its team to ‘provide clear direction to help us create the most technologically advanced Jaguar ever made,’ says Jaguar MD, Rawdon Glover.
This news comes after our chance to both ride and drive in a prototype model of the new electric GT at the start of 2026, as Jaguar keeps the hype train rolling along.
And what a hype train that was when the concept was unveiled. Marketing and new branding set the world alight in 2025, and the resulting Type 00 concept car looked like nothing else wearing the Jaguar name.
The concept is a decadently proportioned concept and the embodiment of new Jaguar’s unfettered creative freedom. But dial everything down a percentage point or two and it’s also new Jaguar’s first production car, a four-door GT set to arrive in 2026. Two further cars – an SUV and a coupe – will follow.
The CAR team react to the Jaguar Type 00: join our debate
Type 00 will, like the branding that came before, polarised at its initial unveil, and the team behind it claims it’s happy for the response to not be universally positive. But you have to wonder. Really, new Jaguar’s design aesthetic is fundamental; the wings on which this entire venture will either soar or come crashing down. And when you think about the successful (and now departed) JLR chief creative officer Gerry McGovern’s cars of the recent past – Defender, the LRX concept/original Evoque, the current Range Rover and its immediate predecessor – the naysayers were an inconsequential minority.
Well aware that without desirability it has nothing, new Jaguar has given its 800-strong team of designers (working across both Jaguar and Land Rover) the best possible platform for success. Indeed, it claims its new cars (the old ones are no longer on sale, though will obviously remain in the network, kept separate from the new-era metal) are electric primarily as a design enabler.
‘The plan was always electric, for the complete creative freedom that brings, insists MD Rawdon Glover. ‘We needed to break free in order to be able to fulfil the brief; to be a copy of nothing. And for us, even if we think EV won’t be the primary reason for purchase, it gives us incredible speed, refinement and acceleration. We’re really excited about how it’s going to drive – it will drive like classic touring Jaguar.’
Is Type 00 what we were expecting? It is. We knew Jaguar planned to avoid many of the tropes – including amorphous streamlined forms and cab-forward proportions – commonly associated with EVs. And in many ways the car’s ultra-clean surfaces, rejection of fussy details and uninterrupted lines are also a natural extension of the work McGovern and team have been doing for years.
Does that diminish the impact of seeing the car for the first time? It does not, though these images – surreal to the point of distraction and far from flattering – do it no favours. Confident and beautifully resolved in places, particularly the shapely tail and pronounced yet sleek rear haunches, it is precisely the kind of statement Jaguar needed to make. Glover describes it as ‘the jaw-dropping future of our original luxury brand,’ and drop jaws it will.
There are questions, of course, not least: why the vast bonnet when no engine will ever call it home? ‘That’s like asking someone why they just climbed a mountain: for the exhilaration of it,’ counters McGovern at the unveil. He also gives some steer as to which elements are likely to survive into production. ‘The proportions are a key aspect of design code. This is not the car as a commodity; it’s not about getting from A to B. It’s a piece of art and exuberant as a coupe, just as the SUV will be exuberant as an SUV.’
How much of Type 00’s impact will be lost in the translation from two-door concept to four-door production car?
‘To answer that I’ll go back to the very start,’ says Glover. ‘Gerry set the team up and it was a competitive process, to try to give this a real sense of edge and ambition. We didn’t want to be conservative, so it was a disruptive process. And once we had our design language, then we then chose a platform for it – design has not been constrained by the platform. With virtually everybody else your platform defines your wheelbase, roof height and lots of other things. We haven’t chosen that route. The challenge to our engineering colleagues was “that’s the way we want the vehicle to look – now let’s build that.” Retaining the design integrity was key, because that’s the most important thing in terms of differentiation and getting that emotional reaction.’
For all the clean-sheet talk, Type 00 inarguably draws inspiration from some decadent eras in car design history, some of them 100 years old. There’s more than an echo of the Bugatti Royale in the statement bonnet; shades of Bentley Speed Six in the silhouette and side window graphic. Flattering references, undoubtedly, and if the production GT can retain the lion’s share of Type 00’s impact then it’ll be a hell of a thing to see on the street.
Say what you like about the final product, JLR cannot be accused of not having gone far enough; of failing to grasp the scope of the challenge/opportunity. Unsuccessful though it may have been, old Jaguar’s inertia must have been enormous.
Can it work? You don’t have to look far to find the source of its confidence to tear everything up and start over. Its work with Land Rover (Defender, primarily, demand for which shows no sign of decaying, nearly five years after release) and Range Rover (when limited-run £455k special editions sell out in moments, the sky would appear to be the limit) has been astonishingly successful. This year, Land Rover and Range Rover powered H1 profits of £1.1bn, up 25 per cent year-on-year. Q2 2024 was JLR’s eighth profitable quarter on the bounce.
The formula? Create uncompromising cars of standout desirability – it really is that simple. Then just stand back and watch the money pour in like Pablo on pay day. Easy. Why not do the same with Jaguar?
JLR insists it’s in this for the long haul; that the Jaguar plan is sufficiently robust and far-reaching to survive short-term blips in EV demand. But the plan pre-supposes that its cars are desired. First impressions, infamously, must be got right first time, even – particularly? – when you’re a 90-year-old brand. For this to work the world must fall in love with Type 00. Over to you, world.
