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Is Jaguar Taking a Cat Nap, or Is the Brand in Real Trouble?

cat nap november december 2024 issue
Is Jaguar Taking a Cat Nap or Nearing the End?Illustration by Dominic Bugatto - Car and Driver

From the November/December issue of Car and Driver.

On February 12, 1957, fire broke out at Jaguar's Browns Lane plant in Coventry, England, destroying hundreds of finished cars. Mercifully, there were few injuries, and owing to the herculean efforts of the company's workers and distraught managers, the plant was up and running again within a week.

It's not often that a carmaker takes a time-out from making cars, but when disaster strikes, there's not much choice. A scheduled cessation, on the other hand, such as Jaguar's recently announced plan to pause making vehicles entirely, is exceedingly rare. Less common still, Jaguar production won't cease for just weeks or even months but for as much as a year or more. The news might lead one to believe that the parent company's name, JLR (for Jaguar Land Rover), may henceforth stand for Just Land Rover.

1996 jaguar xjl
2016 Jaguar XJL.Michael Simari - Car and Driver

Recently, it's tended to feel that way. Jaguar has been ramping down production for years. It dropped its flagship XJ sedan at the end of the 2019 model year. In 2021, Jaguar torched a nine-figure investment when it scuttled an all-electric replacement that was meant to launch around 2022 and share Range Rover's MLA platform. Then, during an investor briefing this past July, JLR CEO Adrian Mardell confirmed that XE and XF sedans, E-Pace and electric I-Pace crossovers, and the F-type sports car have ended production or would do so by year's end. Speaking with disarming frankness, he conceded, "None of those are vehicles on which we made any money."

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That leaves only the F-Pace SUV, the brand's bestseller. But production of that model will wind down at year's end too. Jaguar managing director Rawdon Glover recently told Britain's Autocar that Jaguar "will no longer be on sale for new vehicles" in European markets by the end of 2024, with the U.K. to follow early next year. Leftovers from 2024—and, gulp, before—will be the sole fare at U.S. dealers for 2025.

2025 jaguar fpace p400 awd
2021 Jaguar F-Pace.Michael Simari - Car and Driver

If righting a ship were as easy as simply canceling poor-performing models, the problems of all the world's hurting carmakers would be solved. Yet Jaguar very much has a plan for the future, along with a party line as to what went wrong. And that plan, which it calls Reimagine, is dramatic: Jaguar will depart the mass-market premium field entirely in favor of a three-model lineup of EVs gone significantly upmarket. They will cost more than any Jaguar of yore—and, it is hoped, generate more profit. The new blueprint calls for sales of 50,000 units worldwide at most, a far cry from earlier peak volumes.

Today, the most expensive Range Rovers might cost almost double what top Jaguars cost, and righting that disparity—not as a matter of internecine competition but as one of survival—is a major part of the new plan. The most expensive Jaguar of the 21st century was the XE SV Project 8, a fire-breathing, 300-unit variation on the brand's compact sedan that set records at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, it cost $188,495. Corporate sibling Range Rover, meanwhile, recently sold several of its bespoke SV models in the Middle East for well over $400,000. This is the price point where Jaguar both wants and thinks it needs to be.

Jaguar plans to reveal the first of these new vehicles, a svelte electric GT with an anticipated range of 430 miles, in pre-production form toward the end of 2024 in a reveal rumored to be taking place in Miami. Up next are a sedan of limousine-like proportion and an SUV, both intended to be further expressions of a bold new design language. The three models use the same Jaguar Electrified Architecture platform. The technology promises to be all new, sharing nothing (including its Jaguar-designed motors) with the company's first venture into all-electric propulsion, the outgoing I-Pace. With so much unproven tech onboard, patience is almost surely a necessary virtue. Jaguar had claimed it would be "an all-electric luxury brand by 2025," though the 2025 part now seems doubtful, as the first car isn't likely to hit showrooms much before 2026.

Speaking to Car and Driver in August at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, JLR North America president and CEO Joe Eberhardt said, "We realized that while the current portfolio is beautiful—they're absolutely wonderful, very competitive cars—they lost a little bit of the special DNA that made Jaguar different from anything else that was out there. If you look back at the glory days, those were really unique vehicles. We need to get back to that DNA to find that mojo and build cars that are not necessarily for everyone but that are distinct, unique, and a copy of nothing. And that's what the new portfolio will do."

jaguar sales numbers 2004 to 2023
CHART SALES NUMBERS: AUTOMOTIVE NEWS - Car and Driver

One historic analogue that occurred to us: Ford stopped production of the long-in-the-tooth Model T in 1927 and built no new cars for six months ahead of introducing the Model A, the car that pulled the automaker's smoldering chestnuts out of the fire. One key difference, however, is that unlike the Model T, few of the retiring Jaguars ever sold well, nor did they meaningfully compete in the luxury market.

When Ford took over Jaguar in 1989, it inevitably sought to achieve great multiples of the British brand's former volumes, but it took time and shedloads of Ford's money. In 1992, the English carmaker was selling but 22,478 cars worldwide, a tenth of Cadillac's volume and one-twentieth of Mercedes-Benz's sales. More popularly priced models such as the S-type and X-type that shared underpinnings with contemporary Fords finally arrived for 1999 and 2002, respectively, with technically advanced aluminum-bodied XJs and XKs to follow. Dealers were added, and sales did grow, though conquest sales from premium competitors—Mercedes, BMW, and Lexus—were notably few. And true volume never arrived. In 2002, for instance, Jaguar sold 130,334 units worldwide, still far behind its perceived competition.

2011 jaguar xk coupe
2011 Jaguar XK coupe.Jaguar

In 2023, long after current owner Tata's 2008 acquisition of JLR, and despite a comparative avalanche of investment and new offerings in the 2010s (although today's roster falls between five and 10 years old), worldwide sales totaled just 64,241. With five remaining Jaguar models delivering a combined 8284 U.S. sales in 2023—a near 80 percent drop from 2017's 39,594 and now representing a less than enviable 0.05 percent market share—clearly something wasn't working. By comparison, Mercedes sold 351,746 vehicles to Americans last year; BMW moved 362,244.

Where did Jaguar go wrong? Many observers would point to the historic millstone hanging around its neck: Reliability, or lack thereof, has followed Jaguar around like an annoying ex for half a century, sometimes unfairly, as strides have been made. But Eberhardt, who has been leading JLR in America since 2013, has a different and not entirely implausible explanation. First, there was the anodyne styling. Also key, he said, "the market shifted quite a bit. We had three sedans, and the market went to 80 percent SUVs. So the sedans that succeeded had history. If you think of BMW, it's a 3-series company. And if you have four generations of 3-series, you're pretty damned good at it. So whatever market was left [for sedans] was defended by those that have been there for a long time. Which gives them scale advantages, cost advantages, and loyalty advantages."

Ironically, during Jaguar's periods of greatest perceived success, the 1950s–80s, it was never a volume manufacturer. If annual sales touched 20,000 worldwide, it was a great year. Even the 13,798 sales of the since-canceled XF in 2023 would've made for an excellent year for the whole company in the auto industry of 1960. Indeed, one of Jaguar's best years of the early '70s included just 5500 cars shipped to the U.S.

Today's premium market is 2.5 million to 3 million cars per year, Eberhardt noted, "and in order to compete at the heart of that, you need to have scale. And that's very difficult for an independent manufacturer like us. We don't have the parts bin of Daimler or Toyota. So as a consequence, we have to focus on the part of the market that values heritage and brand pedigree and is willing to pay a premium. We don't want to compete in the heart of the market. We have shown with Range Rover and now with Defender that if you have the right formula, you can actually get a premium."

For their part, Land Rover and Range Rover vaulted JLR to record-breaking revenue for the 12 months ending March 31, 2024, a rise of 27 percent over the previous year. Without the Rovers' success and Tata's dedication to electrification—reflected by a commitment to building a $5 billion battery plant in the U.K.—Jaguar itself might not be here, much less with ambitious plans for a reboot.

cat nap november december 2024 issue
Dominic Bugatto - Car and Driver

It won't be easy, according to analyst Sam Fiorani, vice president of global forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions. "Unless Jaguar's expectations for its upcoming line of EVs is tempered with a dose of reality, the company will be planning to produce far more vehicles than there will be buyers willing to take them home," he says. "Someone at the brand thought to simplify the lineup with a sedan, a utility, and a [GT] coupe, so there might be a glimmer of hope."

Today, Jaguar's U.S. sales have fallen significantly from their height of more than 40,000 per year, Eberhardt acknowledged. "The new cars will sell even fewer," he said. "We have told our dealers, they are aware of that, and they support it." Eberhardt said Jaguar has been actively slimming its network to accommodate the expected reduced volume, down from 200 dealers to around 120, all but six of which are dualed with Land Rover stores.

Given the Land Rover and Range Rover global success, does it make sense to have a Jaguar SUV? "We don't discuss product plans," Eberhardt said, "but keep in mind that there's different interpretations of what that means: SUVs, coupes, crossovers. But we don't need to be big volume. We don't need to fulfill everyone's needs and requirements. Because of the decision to be purely luxury [and all-electric], we gain the freedom for a design language that we wouldn't have with a modular platform... We want to build a car that 30, 40 years from now is still here."

Now that the brand is in an all but unique state of suspended animation, the question nonetheless remains: Will Jaguar itself still be here?

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