In 2005, Jaguar desperately needed a rebrand. The carmaker was losing money. Its traditional customer, motoring commentator Jeremy Clarkson once joked, was the type of man who would go away with his wife to a romantic hotel, spend the night flirting outrageously with a waitress, “and it’s OK because he’s got a Jaaaaaag!” That clientele was evaporating. The company wanted a younger, wealthier audience.
The result was a brand campaign called Gorgeous. In a 90-second advert, close-up images of a Jaguar coupé were spliced with scenes of aristocratic debauchery. The ad’s narrator, Willem Dafoe, implicitly likened the car to a beautiful woman. “Gorgeous has no love for logic. Gorgeous loves fast . . . Gorgeous gets in everywhere . . . Gorgeous pays for itself in the first five seconds.”
The rebrand was not woke. It had the air of a perfume ad. But not everyone appreciated the smell. Detroit News rated Gorgeous the “most obnoxious” car ad of 2005. The website Slate, objecting to its “retrograde cliché”, graded it “D for dinosaur”. If social media had been mainstream in 2005, it might have agreed. Worse, Jaguar’s new models did not sell well. Its parent, Ford, sold Jaguar and fellow British luxury marque Land Rover to India’s Tata Motors soon after.
Nearly 20 years later, Jaguar is again trying to rebrand itself as a luxury good. In November, it released a 30-second ad with no cars. Instead it featured fashion models, and abstract phrases: Create exuberant. Live vivid. Break moulds. Copy nothing. It finished on a new logo.
Social media erupted. The zeitgeist had recently moved away from campaigns seen as woke. The models’ androgynous aesthetic jarred with the mood in the days following Donald Trump’s re-election. Jaguar’s new logo was derided by the American comedian Stephen Colbert as looking “like a luxury condom brand in an eastern European dance club”. Some of the critics expected Jaguar to be the car of English golf clubs or nothing at all. “I predict Jaguar will go bust. And you know what? They deserve to,” said Nigel Farage, the nationalist politician. Others wondered, more pragmatically, if Jaguar’s new messaging catered to consumers in China and the Middle East.
Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
Jaguar, based in Coventry, had produced the ad in-house. The company has not always been on top of the cultural zeitgeist: ideas take time to travel up the M40 motorway from London, one former executive notes wryly. Even so, in one sense, all publicity was good publicity. “Part of this is about making us socially relevant,” says Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover. Like Tesla’s Cybertruck, Jaguar had become impossible to ignore. “This is quite literally the only car brand people seem to be talking about today,” says Alex Sehnaoui, global chief growth officer at advertising agency R/GA.
The repositioning of Jaguar is about more than advertising, or the wild intolerance of social media. It is a story about the car industry, British manufacturing and climate action. Since the 1960s, Jaguar has been a paradox. As a car, it has been a sign of financial success — “oooh, a Jaguar”. As a company, it has been an example of financial impossibility — “aaah, Jaguar”. After 2008, Tata Motors invested billions of pounds vainly trying to make it compete with BMW, Audi and Mercedes. At times, Jaguar was losing nearly £1bn a year, according to people close to the company.
From 2026, Jaguar will relaunch as an all-electric brand. It will sell cars mostly at more than £100,000 — in some cases, nearly three times the price of previous comparable models. In a way, Farage is right. There is no guarantee that this 90-year-old brand, loved by Queen Elizabeth II, British prime ministers and various James Bond villains, will remain a going concern. Ratan Tata’s love of the brand guaranteed Tata Motors would never sell the business while he lived, but the patriarch died in October. “The real issue will be how much more appetite Tata has now that Ratan is gone,” an industry executive says.
Ever since the aftermath of the second world war, Jaguar has had to look abroad for sales. The competition is tougher than ever. If Jaguar cannot thrive, then what about those fellow British manufacturers with a mighty heritage? Glover, the managing director, insists that the future is electric: “All the great ice hockey players skate to where the puck is going, not where it is right now.” Jaguar’s rich customer can always use their other, non-electric car on occasions they need more than a 400-mile range. Yet other companies, including BP, have already found that going green is easier to proclaim than to execute. Why should Jaguar be any different?
Perhaps the most withering response to Jaguar’s new campaign came from Elon Musk, who posted on X: “Do you sell cars?” Leave aside that Musk, as chief executive of Tesla, is a direct competitor. Or that Tesla itself long did not pay for traditional advertising; Musk himself, with his outrageous posts and crypto schemes, is its main publicity machine.
One answer to Musk’s question is: no. Jaguar does not currently sell new cars in the UK. That is because, six years ago, some executives plotted a historic overhaul. After a decade of flagging sales, they accepted that a radical new direction was needed. The reinvention would be known as “Project Roar” — a code name that would seem ironic, when it ended with the leaping cat being removed from the front of the car. The chief executive who ultimately launched it, Thierry Bolloré, would leave after barely two years. But his successor Adrian Mardell would commit to investing £18bn over five years, with a £500mn investment to transform the manufacturing site in Halewood and another £20mn a year to retrain existing and new employees. Mardell also agreed to stop selling new Jaguars in the UK, and to stop producing most petrol models, while the switch to all-electric, ultra-high-end vehicles took place.
This overhaul is one of the most significant in the company’s history. Jaguar’s roots date back to 1922, when William Lyons, a young car salesman from Blackpool, co-founded a business making motorcycle sidecars. In 1928, Lyons’s Swallow Sidecar Company launched its own car at its factory in Coventry. Six years later, it produced its first model with the name Jaguar and a “leaper” at the front.
Lyons invested in motor racing to associate Jaguar cars with speed. In the 1950s, Jaguar cars won the Le Mans 24-hour race five times. In 1961, Jaguar launched the E-Type — a consumer car based on one of its winning models. The two-seater was quick and sleek. It became the first and only British-made car to be added to the permanent collection of the New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
As the business grew, Lyons — described in the FT’s obituary as “dictatorial and aloof” — never found the right successor to run it. Jaguar became part of British Leyland, later nationalised by the UK government. It was privatised by Margaret Thatcher, but its models had quality problems. American owners joked that you should buy two Jags: one to drive, the other for spare parts.
When Ford bought Jaguar for £1.6bn in 1989, it was paying, in the words of one banker, “for some walnut fascia and old-world charm”. Other British car brands, Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Mini, had been bought by foreign companies. Ford could not revive Jaguar’s early ’60s swagger. Nor has Tata Motors been able to, even as it revived Land Rover into a British export success story.
Under Ralf Speth, chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover from 2010 to 2020, Jaguar’s approach was to match premium German brands by launching more and more models: including the XE and the XF saloons and the F-Pace, the first Jaguar SUV. But scale matters in the market for corporate cars. It gives marketing firepower. It also allows carmakers to suit their customers. On TV, Inspector Morse drove a Jaguar. In real life, the UK police wanted to be able to buy cars with either manual or automatic transmission, says one former Jaguar Land Rover executive. Jaguar could only offer automatics. The commitment to outstanding design remained. An F-Type, a roadster launched in 2013, was engineered with an exhaust that sounded like a purring cat when at rest, then growled as it accelerated. Pitched against the mighty Porsche 911, it just didn’t sell.
Jaguar belatedly dabbled in electric models. The I-Pace, an electric SUV launched in 2018 and priced at £61,000 in the UK, won the World Car of the Year. Jaguar signed a deal to deliver 20,000 I-Paces for Google’s self-driving taxi service. But since 2018, neither Jaguar nor Land Rover has launched a new all-electric car.
When Jaguar committed to an all-electric future in 2021, it was following the trend. Weeks earlier, GM said it would go all-electric by 2035. Ford had said that all its new European cars would be electric by 2030. Today’s slowdown in electric car sales growth was not yet on the horizon.
The shift to electric is complicated. Jaguar’s selling point was standing apart. Last year, Jaguar won Formula E, the electric variant of the car-racing competition, for the first time. Its new models will have an impressive range of up to 478 miles. But electric cars are more similar than petrol variants in their driving performance. What really matters to customers is software — and perhaps design and brand.
It was Jaguar’s chief creative officer, Gerry McGovern, who most strongly saw the parallels between Jaguar and luxury fashion brands. McGovern realised form could trump function. He refashioned the workhorse Land Rover Discovery into a stylish Range Rover Sport, and sold it for 50 per cent more. Under him, Jaguar Land Rover also broadened beyond male buyers. It hired Victoria Beckham to help launch the Range Rover Evoque, the smallest Range Rover to date.
McGovern’s inspiration comes from art, architecture and mid-century furniture. “His focus on design is far broader than the traditional automotive design,” said one person who has worked closely with him.
Days after Jaguar’s controversial advert, McGovern stood on stage at Miami Art Week — an unconventional site for an auto unveiling — with two of Jaguar’s new concept cars, the Type 00. “Jaguar has no desire to be loved by everybody,” he said, wearing a Hermès black denim jacket. “Some may love it now. Some may love it later, and some may never love it. And that’s OK because that’s what fearless creativity does.”
The Type 00 polarised opinion, but there was a consensus that it looked different: the long bonnet, the low roof, the lack of a rear window. “This is not like any other electric car I can think of,” said Harry Metcalfe, a YouTubing car enthusiast.
Jaguar’s creativity was not all it seemed. The Type 00 is 5.1 metres long. This is too big to sell in the UK and most of continental Europe. Executives counter that the big size is part of why Jaguar’s transformation is bold. People with knowledge of the deliberations say, in fact, Jaguar did not have much of a choice. The upcoming models are built on a platform derived from that of the full-electric Jaguar XJ sedan and the electric Land Rover — two models abandoned by former chief executive Bolloré. “This desire to be different is not as though they’ve actually started with a clean piece of paper. They started with a platform that had to be 5.1 metres,” one of the people added.
The most startling thing about most car ads is how boring they are. A car drives on a winding mountainous road, or through a deserted city. It is shot from above, with close-ups of its wheels and its rear lights. Watch too many of these ads, and you won’t yearn to buy a car: you’ll yearn for any ad with a sense of humour. These ads are generic because executives are imprisoned by reams of consumer data, says Alicia Johnson, one of the creative directors of Jaguar’s 2005 Gorgeous campaign. What’s more, transporting and filming a car is expensive.
But occasionally brands find some va-va-voom. Shortly before Jaguar’s controversial rebranding, Volvo released an ad for its electric SUV, the EX90, shot by the cinematographer of the film Oppenheimer. In it, a young couple discover they are about to have a baby. The father-to-be recounts his hopes and fears (slightly bizarrely, he does this in a phone call with his mother). At the very end, his pregnant partner crosses the road in front of a Volvo SUV — only to be saved by the car’s superior braking system. “Designed to be the safest Volvo car ever made,” says the ad. The new family lives happily ever after.
Rightwing accounts on Elon Musk’s X heralded Volvo’s ad as “pro-family” compared to Jaguar’s “wokeness”. Certainly, Volvo’s appeal to safety has been well established over years. Its loyal customers have included one Nigel Farage.
But fundamentally, Jaguar would like to be in a different market. The Volvo EX90 sells from £96,255. Jaguar’s cars will aim to charge more — below the ultra-premium brands such as Ferrari and Rolls-Royce, but competing with the likes of Porsche and Bentley. Go to the Volvo website, and you will find offers for loans and discounts. Go to the Bentley website, and you won’t even find a pound sign. This is the end of the market where affordability is assumed.
Luxury cars are increasingly sold not by TV ads, but through personalised messaging. When Jaguar launches its next models — three models are expected, starting in late 2026 — it will target ultra-high-net-worth individuals in North America, the Middle East and Asia. It will look for early adopters — the people who keenly bought the first Apple Watch, the first Porsche Cayenne, and the Tesla Cybertruck, says Sehnaoui. Jaguar is not trying to be its buyer’s only car.
The company will eschew traditional showrooms. Pop-up stores will emerge in art and fashion districts: “These will likely be by invitation-only,” says Sehnaoui. Personalised features are key: ultra-wealthy buyers want the opportunity to have something that their neighbours do not. Ferrari and Bentley have earned hefty margins, customising their vehicles with, for example, special leather for the interior or carbon fibre panels.
The theory is easier than the practice. China has accounted for a quarter of Jaguar Land Rover’s sales recently. But most premium brands — including Audi, Bentley, Aston Martin and Maserati — have been hit by declining sales there. Few executives expect the market to be ever as lucrative and promising as in the past.
Jaguar’s attempted transformation is dramatic. “At the moment there is no market for £100,000-plus EVs,” says one former employee. “You’ve lost all your current customers and you’re hoping you’re going to find new ones. That’s a really tough journey,” said Scott Sherwood, an independent analyst of supercars and luxury car brands. “And you’re trying to do it by selling lifestyle at a price point with a piece of technology that everybody else is struggling at.”
Other carmakers including Volvo have struggled to launch their EVs on time due to software issues. “JLR doesn’t have the greatest track record of launching cars on time,” one former employee says.
For all its changes, Jaguar is perhaps living up to its name. Jaguars are apex predators. But their habitat is shrinking. Last year the number of Jaguar cars sold was just below 67,000, only slightly ahead — on one estimate — of the number of actual jaguars that remain in the wild.
By charging more for its cars, Jaguar can be profitable by selling fewer: it estimates that it only needs to sell about 30,000 cars a year to break even, less than half as many as it did last year. All it needs is to excite the super-rich. As Glover, Jaguar’s managing director, has said: “Nobody needs a vehicle at £120,000. You have to want one.”
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
