► Jaguar’s electric relaunch in 2025
► Four-door GT first of three cars
► Breaking news from Jag HQ
Jaguar’s ‘brave’ gamble to reinvent itself as a pure electric luxury brand begins in 2025 with sales of a pure electric, four-door GT. It’ll be the first of three models rolled out in rapid succession – just over a year – with starting prices from £100,000 and positioning that targets Bentley.
The new Jaguars will be ‘exuberant, fearless and jaw-dropping,’ says Professor Gerry McGovern, JLR’s creative director and design leader. The inspiration is Jaguar founder Sir William Lyons’ philosophy that Jaguars should be ‘a copy of nothing’.
All future Jaguars will be spun off an architecture dubbed JEA, standing for Jaguar Electrified Architecture. Vehicle range is predicted to be 430 miles, close to doubling the 246-mile range of Jaguar’s sole existing EV, the i-Pace. And recharging should restore 200 miles in 15 minutes.
Jaguar goes electric: it’s a massive gamble…
The Jaguar brand has looked in suspended animation to external commentators and customers. ‘It’s quite brave to just stop and completely reinvent a brand,’ says chief commercial officer Lennard Hoornik (below). ‘That braveness is to be admired.’
Jaguar is certainly taking some radical medicine. The brand is jettisoning everything: today’s range, including the acclaimed but modest-selling electric iPace, combustion-engined propulsion and pretty much its entire customer base, given the transaction price will jump to six figures from below Jag and Land Rover’s 2019 average of £44,000.
So the question on everyone’s lips is can Jaguar be transformed from dormant irrelevance to genuine Bentley rival? It won’t be for a lack of investment: Tata will invest £15 billion in Jaguar Land Rover over the next five years (it’s unclear how much will go to Jaguar individually though, with the new electric technology and software scalable across its Land Rover 4x4s too).
Designer overtime: 18 models in mere months
McGovern divided his design resource into three teams, to come up with competing visions of a future Jaguar new model family. The brief was for people to have a ‘jaw dropping moment upon seeing a new Jaguar for the first time’.
The three design teams ‘created 18 full-size models in a relatively short time,’ explains McGovern (below). ‘It was amazing!’ And it was a unanimous decision to plump for the winning family of designs.
Unfortunately, the only hint at the new look Jaguars is the abstract image leading our article: we won’t see the first new model until 2024. But it hints at sharp but unadorned body surfacing, radical proportions such as long bonnets and cars that are much lower to the ground than Range Rover, Defender and Discovery, the three SUV lines in JLR’s ‘House of Brands’.
Is this the biggest challenge McGovern – whose career took off with the ’90s MG F and went full circle back to Land Rover after a stint at Lincoln – has ever faced? ‘Yes’ he says emphatically.
JLR is hinting that the bodytypes should be pioneering. ‘The Jaguar Electric Architecture is developed specifically to deliver modernist, exuberant, reimagined Jaguars,’ says engineering director Nick Collins. ‘Expect exuberant proportions with refinement and proportion in keeping with our new brand positioning.’
Will JLR build a Gigafactory to power the new Jags?
JLR has also confirmed that it will be the lead customer for a European Gigafactory, being established by parent company Tata Motors. Executives studiously avoided confirming the location of a plant that’s five years away; in the background it is lobbying investment from the UK government. But JLR promises that it has secured sufficient battery production to power the new Jags – and the electric Range Rover that comes a year earlier, in 2024.
The electric Jags will be assembled in the Midlands, in the Solihull plant, alongside the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport. Castle Bromwich, which currently assembles Jaguar’s saloons and the F-type sports car, will be reconfigured as a stamping plant and the site shrunk.
It’s all change at JLR’s Wolverhampton engine facility too: production of electric drive units is being introduced, as the M54 plant begins its long journey from combustion to electric manufacturing. Its name has already changed, to the Electric Propulsion Manufacturing Centre (above).