Winston Churchill reputedly said ‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’ This adage must have been at the forefront of the minds of Jaguar’s chief executives as they unveiled the brand’s new electric concept car, the Type 00, during Miami Art Week. The company has had a torrid past few weeks as the advertisement they chose to announce their relaunch with was met with a mixture of incomprehension and ridicule. The company was accused of being everything from woke to simply incompetent at the job of selling cars that people might want to buy.
Unfortunately, the results are not just hideous, but spectacularly, provocatively so
Therefore, the launch of the Type 00 vehicle in two colours, Miami Pink and London Blue, was more important than normal for the company. The leak online beforehand of the designs was unfortunate, if predictable. The diabolical advert has led to an unusual amount of interest in these cars and what it means for the future of Jaguar. It would be a great relief to report that their chief creative officer Gerry McGovern’s ‘design vision concept’ lives up to their stated intent of a ‘concept with bold forms and exuberant proportions to inspire future Jaguars’. After all, the company remains one of the greatest and most enduring British brands. A combination of elegant classicism and forward-looking innovation could have dispelled some of the criticism.
Unfortunately, the results are not just hideous, but spectacularly, provocatively so. My first reaction when I saw the images of the Miami Pink and London Blue Type 00 was to clutch my sides in horror and restrain myself from shouting obscenities in public, so violently ugly were the new vehicles.
If Jaguar has been synonymous with anything throughout its long and illustrious history, it has been restraint and good taste. Now, under the stewardship of its managing director Rawdon Glover, the inmates have not only taken over the asylum, but are gleefully daubing graffiti all over the walls as they burn it down. Both of these cars – which, amusingly, have omitted a rear window, meaning that drivers must instead look out via cameras installed on the front wheel – look like rejected prototypes from the Eighties, the kind of thing that Don Johnson would have been ashamed to have been seen driving in Miami Vice. They are ugly, clunky behemoths, the kind of things that should be laughed at in the street. In other words, they are Not Good.
Jaguar have, of course, been talking an impressive game. McGovern has compared his work to that of Richard Rogers, Vivienne Westwood and, sacrilegiously, David Bowie. Clearly, he must have been thinking of the latter’s ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’. It has been vitally important to the company that they innovate in order to compete with the likes of Tesla, and Glover has correctly stated that ‘At the moment, the industry is going through huge disruption: technology changes, as we all figure out actually what an electrified world means for our brand.’ He then said that ‘At Jaguar, we’ve looked at that and we think we have to make a really bold step forward. But actually, the step we’re going to take is completely in keeping in ethos with the brand.’
Up to a point, Lord Copper. I cannot be the only person to think that the whole hideous desecration is some sort of strange prank. But this jaw-droppingly, eye-rollingly misguided imbecility suggests that everyone involved must really loathe the company that they are working for. Either that, or they’re not very good at their well-paid jobs. Success may, indeed, be the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Based on this particular ghastliness, everyone involved in the present-day Jaguar must be very, very enthusiastic indeed.