It has no rear window, won’t fit in a UK parking space and – starting at £130,000 – ($172,000) is aimed squarely at wealthy tech industry buyers who travel America’s main roads.
Jaguar’s electric car, the Type 01, was launched Tuesday evening in New York and marks the culmination of a two-year rebranding that has been one of the most scrutinized in automotive history.
Bosses hope the vehicle will appeal to a younger, wealthier audience than the automaker’s former “shrinking and aging” customer base of “men in their 50s,” said Rawdon Glover, 58, Jaguar’s chief executive.
With an ultra-long hood, a low roof and a muscular design, the Type 01 clearly stands out from its predecessor, the F-Type. It’s also double the F-Type’s starting price, at around £62,000.
Buyers are likely to be wealthy, “urban” and “very design literate, very tech literate,” Glover said. “The person who makes this purchase will choose the car because it’s a bold choice.”
A senior JLR executive close to the Type 01 project put it more bluntly: “It’s the type of car you park and everyone stops and says, ‘What the fuck did you just show up in?’ »
The launch comes at a critical time for parent company Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which is struggling with falling sales as cheaper Chinese rivals eat into its market share in the UK. The country is still recovering from a massive cyberattack last year which cost the economy around £1.9 billion.
JLR recently announced 4,000 job cuts in a bid to save £1.7bn over two years, citing “intense competition and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty”. The Guardian understands that Jaguar employees working on the Type 01 program have been offered voluntary redundancy, as have the rest of JLR’s non-manufacturing workforce.
The car will go on sale in early 2027, with the first deliveries expected in the second half of the year.
“It’s really important that we put Jaguar back on a stronger financial footing,” Glover said. When asked if doubling prices would be effective, he said it was better than “working hard like we’ve done for the last two decades in volume bonuses.”
Range Rover also revealed its first fully electric model in September with a starting price of £154,070, compared to £107,530 for its combustion engine predecessor.
Falling demand in China, a key market for luxury cars, has also hit Jaguar hard. Glover revealed that the Type 01 won’t be launched in the country for “a few years. We decided to wait.”
However, he added that China would eventually become “an important part of the equation… it’s very difficult for an automaker to exclude the largest auto market in the world.”
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PB Balaji, JLR’s chief executive, said the parent company would look to North America and target more sales to millionaires and billionaires to turn around its fortunes.
Glover admitted that even if the Type 01 launch had taken place in New York, it “absolutely” could have taken place in Silicon Valley, reflecting the type of buyer Jaguar is targeting. He recently took a prototype to the offices of Nvidia, the California-based AI company whose boss, Jensen Huang, took a tour and “loved it.”
The car has no rear window, but a rear-facing camera in place of a traditional rearview mirror. The car produces more than 1,000 horsepower and Jaguar claims it will travel up to 400 miles on a single charge.
It follows a controversial rebranding that began with a late 2024 advert featuring rear-facing models with no car in sight. The advert sparked a negative reaction online and was followed by the Type 00 concept car which was revealed in “Miami pink”, which Donald Trump described as “woke”, while Nigel Farage said Jaguar deserved to go bankrupt.
Glover admitted that the backlash “hasn’t always been easy,” but added: “The reality is we’ll have to attract a new audience. »
That’s just as well: at 2 meters (6 feet 5 inches) wide, the Type 01 will monopolize the British country roads frequented by Jaguar’s old clientele, while at over 5.2 meters in length, it won’t fit into a standard 4.8 meter British parking space.
“There are long cars on the market,” Glover said, adding that a Land Rover Defender with one wheel in the rear is longer than the Type 01, which he said had the “turning circle of a Fiat 500” with its all-wheel steering. “It’s incredibly maneuverable.”
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said: “Jaguar’s new electric vehicle is a crucial step in JLR’s plans to invest more than £15 billion in the UK, and another big vote of confidence in our world-class automotive industry.
“This cutting-edge new model, designed, manufactured and built in Britain, will support thousands of jobs across the West Midlands and North West, and builds on more than £1 billion of UK automotive investment secured last month – marking another milestone in our mission to reindustrialise Britain. »
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