CHRIS HARRIS
Jag’s electric announcement promises plenty, but with Tesla already streaks ahead, to what extent?
“A STUDY CONCLUDED VW AND TOYOTA ARE SIX YEARS BEHIND TESLA IN TECH TERMS”
Jaguar, the company that built the fastest car in the world, using an internal combustion engine to achieve 120mph in its stunning XK120, will not build anything that requires liquid fuel beyond 2025. This announcement was made in a flurry of marketing speak and congratulated by the prime minister himself.
Is it an uplifting message, or not? I certainly want it to be just that – I live in the UK and a functioning Jaguar is a good thing for the economy, for jobs and for the lives of anyone who supplies the factories that build the cars. But the truth is Jaguar has been failing for many years now. The XE was a colossal flop, the new XF remains an utterly charming car that for some reason people ignore and even though the F-Pace has carved a reasonable market position, it is swamped by all the German mid-size SUVs.
The truth is, the Tata group only had a few options for Jaguar. The first was to kill it – we can all be thankful it didn’t do that. The second was to absorb the Jaguar DNA into the far more successful Land Rover brand and offer people (mainly Americans) Jagwar versions of a Land Rover – pure badge engineering in other words.
The third option is the bravest and the one it has chosen: go pure electric. It is pragmatic too – even a stumbling Jaguar needs hundreds of millions of euro in engine development and that can now end. Moreover, Jag now avoids the emasculating descent into downsizing that’ll see many making 300cc quad-turbo hybrids to power big saloons, which we will all laugh at a few years from now.
The green credentials for UK customers of a UK assembled electric car should not be underestimated. Emissions will soon be judged on a lifetime basis and then people will see just how much energy is wasted shunting components and finished product around the globe. Buying cars built near where you live could become a thing again, and Britain is quite a prosperous nation with lots of roads, so that could work out well for Jaguar.
From there, I’m struggling to see much more good news, but I’ll keep trying. Jaguar is ostensibly a luxury car brand and therefore the silent propulsion of an EV platform should suit it – its classic V12 was always the quest for silent motoring after all.
The trouble is, the electric future – and the dominance of Tesla – has framed carmakers going forward as technology companies. And most are hopeless in this role. A recent study concluded VW and Toyota are six years behind Tesla in pure tech terms. Those are the two biggest car companies in the world and they are spending billions to catch up with the real-life Stark. How is little old Jaguar supposed to compete with that? I’m not sure it can.
Expect more of these electric-only announcements, because the future has now been framed by legislators and politicians to allow carmakers no other option. It is, in many ways, a hopeless situation. But within that last statement does lie a small but crucial nucleus of hope. When you tell clever people there is only one possible solution to a problem, they tend to prove you wrong, and a technology no one ever expected to prevail does just that. Hydrogen, synthetic fuels, flying cars that run on air? Who knows, but there might still be one wearing a Jaguar badge.