Jaguar has spent decades doing something car companies are exceptionally good at doing: remembering. Remember the E-Type. Remember the XJ. Remember the XK. Remember when Jaguars were beautiful. Remember when they were British. Remember when the hood was long and the grille looked expensive.
Fine. We remember. The problem is that Jaguar has spent decades staring into the rear-view mirror while seemingly forgetting there’s a road ahead. The Type 01 changes that, and this is upsetting people.
Heritage Makes a Terrible Blueprint
Jaguar describes its new design philosophy as exuberant modernism, which is corporate language for removing all the visual clutter and refusing to decorate the car with heritage references simply because someone on the internet likes them.
That’s good. Because Jaguar’s greatest design moments have historically arrived when the company was willing to abandon what came before. Company co-founder Sir William Lyons understood this better than nearly every modern car executive. In 1961, he replaced the XK150 with the E-Type. He didn’t update the old car’s grille, stick on some new lamps and announce that Jaguar was honoring its heritage. He moved on. Seven years later, the Mark 2, S-Type and 420 were swept aside for the singular XJ6. Again: move on.
And then, in 1975, Jaguar replaced the sacred E-Type with the XJS. The XJS wasn’t an E-Type with a new haircut. It was radically different, and for years people complained about it. Sound familiar? Eventually, the XJS became a Jaguar icon in its own right.
What Lyons understood is something car company executives frequently forget: yesterday’s triumph makes a terrible blueprint for tomorrow.
A New Jaguar, Not an Old One
Therefore, the Type 01 isn’t an attempt at recreating an old Jaguar. It’s an effort to establish a new one. Its name emphasizes that fact. Type is the heritage reference; 0 for zero emissions and 1 for the first in a new line of Jaguars. Yet Jaguar clearly raided its own genetic vault. There are echoes of the E-Type and XJS in the Type 01’s long, low proportions and theatrical sweep. There’s the familiar Jaguar sense that the car has somewhere important to be and everyone else should get out of the way.
But this isn’t some desperate automotive séance in which yesterday’s grille is bolted onto tomorrow’s body while everyone stands around chanting heritage. The Type 01 looks like Jaguar has finally decided that nostalgia is not a place worth living in.
The Outrage Is Free. The Jaguar Isn’t.
That’s precisely why traditionalists won’t like it. Jaguar is trying to make a Jaguar for people who don’t already own one. That’s the point. The loudest complaints will inevitably come from people furious that the Type 01 doesn’t look enough like the Jaguars they remember or already own. It’s an interesting criticism considering that many of these people aren’t going to buy a Jaguar regardless of what it looks like. They are reviewing a car for a customer who exists primarily in their memories. The Type 01 isn’t obliged to satisfy them.
There are also complaints about the Type 01’s cozy rear seats and somewhat small trunk. Obviously, these people have never met a Jaguar before. Jaguar’s cars have never been rolling warehouses. They are about style, proportion and making you feel slightly more important than everyone else at the traffic light, not transporting six adults and a Costco run. The rear seat is for people you like, but perhaps not enough to give them a lounge chair. And the trunk is for luggage, not the contents of your garage.
And Now for the Uncomfortable Part
Nevertheless, the Jaguar Type 01 does have one serious problem.
Lyons famously said, “A Jaguar should be a copy of nothing.” The designers of the Type 01 have clearly taken that to heart. But they seem to have forgotten another Lyons observation: “It doesn’t cost any more to make something pretty.”
And the Jaguar Type 01 just isn’t pretty. Striking? Absolutely. Dramatic? Certainly. Distinctive? You’d have to be blind not to notice it. But beautiful? No. And that matters because Jaguar is not some anonymous technology company that wandered into the car business yesterday.
The Bet Jaguar Is Making
Beauty is Jaguar’s inheritance and the Type 01’s lack of it is Jaguar’s great gamble.
Jaguar has finally stopped copying its past. It’s stopped rummaging through the costume department for an E-Type grille and decided to draw something new.
Excellent.
Now it has to convince us that new doesn’t have to mean merely dramatic. For Jaguar doesn’t need another car that reminds us of what Jaguar used to be. It needs one that makes us want to see what Jaguar becomes next.
Editor’s note: This column originally appeared in The Car Collective Substack.
