On Tuesday 19 November 2024, Jaguar revealed its fresh brand identity with a new monogram badge housing a J and an r, a sort of Venetian blind leaping cat caged in a barcode, and wordmark spelling JaGUar in jumbled upper and lower case. Meanwhile, Jaguar's social media channels deleted their entire archives and posted a 30 second video that didn't feature a single car, showing a posse of high fashion models posing in a lift and poncing about with a paintbrush and mallet in a children's soft play zone. The new mantra: copy nothing and delete ordinary.
The internet exploded. When asked how they felt about Jaguar's new logo, the German newspaper Bild's audience voted Creepy, this no longer has anything to do with Jaguar at 93 percent amongst over 17,800 participants. Even Elon Musk weighed in, asking where the cars were. Criticism ranged from commenters critiquing the company's font choice and decision to remove the Jaguar animal logo, which has been featured on cars since the 1950s, to calling the company woke and saying it was abandoning its heritage.
Then came the Type 00 concept in December. The Type 00 has a long bonnet and a fastback profile, as well as 23 inch alloy wheels, presented in two colors: Miami Pink and London Blue. In a recent Reddit thread discussing the design, the EV is described as a huge slab of impracticality and design and a car designed by someone who has never seen a car before and intended for buyers that have never driven one. It looks like nothing Jaguar has ever built, which appears to be precisely the point.
Rawdon Glover, managing director of Jaguar, is the man charged with steering the beloved brand through its rebirth, and it hasn't all been smooth sailing. The company is in the midst of what it calls a firebreak to create distance between its previous mainstream semi premium guise and its target of morphing into a Porsche and Bentley rival selling £100k ultra luxury EVs to a younger, more diverse cash rich, time poor clientele. Glover told Design Week UK that he anticipates 80 to 90 percent of Jaguar's upcoming electric model sales to go to first time Jaguar buyers. Translation: current customers don't matter because they're not buying anyway.
The numbers justify the panic. Despite Jaguar reporting a 39 percent annual uptick to 13,528 unit sales in the year to April 2024, the figure is down from 81,570 a decade ago. In the last decade Jaguar pitched itself as a rival to Audi, BMW and Mercedes, but even in its peak year of 2019, annual sales topped out at just over 610,000, less than two thirds the stated goal of one million. At best, for every single Jaguar XE customer, there were six BMW 3 Series buyers. The volume strategy failed spectacularly.
As of November 2024, no new Jaguars are in production for the first time since 1948. The entire lineup has been discontinued. No XE. No XF. No F-Type. Nothing until 2026 when the first £100,000 plus electric GT arrives. That's assuming anyone wants to buy it.
The rebrand fallout continues to worsen. According to Autocar, Jaguar Land Rover's chief creative officer Gerry McGovern was asked to leave the firm on Monday and his position was terminated with immediate effect. McGovern was responsible for the Type 00 concept EV and the broader design direction. Jaguar also ditched the ad agency responsible for the campaign. When both the advertising company behind the rebrand and the design chief behind the concept are out within months, that's not refinement. That's panic.
The problem goes beyond the rebrand itself to a more existential question about what makes cars desirable in the electric age, with traditional thrills of internal combustion such as sound, speed and mechanical drama fast becoming irrelevant. As EVs lean into minimalism, efficiency and tech led rationality, the emotional connection to the car risks being left behind. Jaguar's solution was to abandon everything that made a Jaguar a Jaguar and hope wealthy buyers respond to pink concept cars and jumbled typography.
This is a brand that built the E-Type, which Enzo Ferrari called the most beautiful car ever made. A brand that won Le Mans seven times. A brand that defined British automotive elegance for decades. And now it's producing marketing materials that look like a fashion brand having an identity crisis while showing no actual cars and spelling its own name wrong for visual harmony.
Jaguar risks alienating traditional buyers attached to accessible, classically luxurious vehicles, with the premium EV market already crowded with established players like Tesla, Bentley, Rolls Royce, and newcomers like Lucid. The first production car, a four door electric GT, arrives late 2025. Until then, Jaguar is a brand with no products, alienated customers, fired executives, and a rebrand that 93 percent of surveyed Germans found creepy.
Maybe this is genius. Maybe in 2026 when the £100,000 electric GT appears, everyone will understand the vision and Jaguar will emerge as a phoenix from the ashes of its own making. Or maybe this is what happens when a struggling brand decides burning everything down and starting over is easier than fixing what made it great in the first place. Glover and what's left of his team have two years to prove which scenario plays out. The world is watching. Most of them are laughing.
