Wednesday briefing: What Jaguar’s radical rebrand reveals about the shift to electric cars

Good morning. Over the past few days, you may have been wondering why a neon pink tank has been following you round the internet. Relax: this isn’t an algorithm judging your taste and predicting your next purchase. It isn’t a tank, either. It is a Jaguar Type 00, it is the subject of an unholy quantity of media coverage, and it may be a vision of the electric future.

Or: it may be a sharp bit of marketing whose weirdest features will never make it to the cars Jaguar actually sells. Either way, it’s a story with a lot to tell us about how the rush for electric is changing the car industry. For today’s newsletter, Jasper Jolly, who covers the automotive industry for the Guardian, explains why. Here are the headlines.

In depth: ‘The idea of a car being woke is strange – it’s a status symbol about wealth’

The first sign that Type 00 discourse might become a problem was the appearance of a teaser video online before the launch itself. The “copy nothing” campaign, which featured a group of stern-faced models in fluorescent outfits getting out of a lift on what I suspect to be Mars, was celebrated by Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover, as a way to “move away from traditional automotive stereotypes”, presumably because there weren’t any cars in it.

Weird car guys and their fellow travellers, meanwhile, lost their minds about it being “woke”. Nigel Farage said Jaguar deserved to go bust; Andrew Tate called it “gay bullshit”; Giles Coren has written about it three times now. Whether any of the players actually mean any of what they say or care about it for reasons beyond their personal brand is another question.

To everyone else, it just looked like a totally generic bit of marketing guff; ironically enough, “copy nothing” seems pretty derivative of Apple’s old “think different” campaign, among about a million other familiar reference points. (“Delete ordinary,” Jaguar also said. “Go bold. Braindump spacecar.” OK, I made one of those up.)

Anyway, then the car itself appeared, and you will not believe this but it was pink!!! People on TikTok hated it, the Daily Mail reported. But if this is really a car for the woke mob, the £100,000 tag on the road version being released in 2026 seems like quite an improbable price point. (Also, it doesn’t really scan that it would look so much like Elon Musk’s hideous and extremely anti-woke Cybertruck.) “The idea of a car being woke is quite strange to me,” Jasper Jolly said. “This kind of car, especially, is a status symbol about wealth. That is the market that Jaguar is interested in.”

What is a concept car, anyway?

In theory, a concept car is a vision of the future: a way to test out radical styling or technological advances outside the confines of competitively priced mass production. They drive the technology forwards, the rationale goes, whether they work out or not. (Although it is a shame that the Plymouth Voyager III, which briefly appeared in 1990, didn’t lead to us all driving cars with a detachable minibus for the family at the back.)

In reality, of course, they are above all marketing exercises, and a way for car salesmen to feel a bit like Steve Jobs when they get on stage at the product launch. If the features that attract the coverage never make it to the road, who cares? “They try to be as ambitious as possible, then they retreat a bit in the versions that they actually sell,” Jasper said.

“The extent of the retreat is different for each brand. My sense here is that a lot of it will end up in the production version.” Those have already been tested, wrapped in hilariously cloak-and-dagger black-and-white wrapping paper to disguise what it will look like, but it appears to be the same sort of thing with four doors instead of two.

Even so, the road version of this one is unlikely to feature a “travertine” (a type of limestone, apparently) plinth or a brass spine down the middle. You may also have options other than electric blue or pink.

Why does this one look like it belongs to Fascist Dystopian Barbie?

Look, it’s not for me, and nobody cares about that. But it’s also not for the ageing market that buys Jaguars in ever smaller numbers, and Jaguar Land Rover care about that very much indeed.

The problem, said Jasper, is that “when people talk about classic Jaguars, they talk about the E-Type – but that car is a symbol of the 60s. The other image that comes up again and again is Inspector Morse driving his Jaguar – you can’t get much further from the market that they are hoping to reach.”

The slightly sinister phrase for the desired shift is from “a legacy automotive brand” to “a pure luxury brand”: basically, if you can remember what they used to look like, they would rather not hear from you. “This is not a depiction of how we think our future customers are,” Glover told the FT. “We don’t want to necessarily leave all of our customers behind. But we do need to attract a new customer base.”

For a sense of who that might be, ask yourself where you tend to see cars like this – gigantic things that make you feel more powerful than the losers on the pavement because they’d barely dent the bonnet if you ran them over. The answer tends to be in the interchangeable luxury districts of cities like London, Paris and Dubai, where the supercars are 10 a penny (and, generally, attracting parking fines or stuck in traffic rather than purring along the open road).

“They’ve already said their first showroom [actually, they call them ‘brand stores’] is going to be in the Paris fashion district,” Jasper said. “Yes, they’re going for a younger person, but it’s not a ‘woke’ younger person. And it’s not that young – in luxury car terms, ‘young’ is your 30s or 40s. It’s an international moneyed elite, and it wouldn’t be surprising if they’re thinking about tech entrepreneurs or people with inherited wealth.”

As Jeff Dodds, former marketing director of Honda, grimly puts it in this roundup of reaction: “Inspector Morse wouldn’t go near it, but if his grandson has just launched a cybersecurity startup then he might.”

What does the Type 00 tell us about the market for electric cars?

I hate to break this to you, but while the Jaguar press release claims that it decided to make its new cars look so funny because they are a “fearlessly creative” tribute to “the DNA of the brand”, it’s mostly because everyone has stopped buying the old ones – even, for the most part, the classic car enthusiasts who have been popping off on the internet about it. As Jasper points out in this excellent analysis piece, sales have fallen from 180,000 in 2018 to fewer than 67,000 in 2023. (It has now stopped selling new ones altogether.) It may therefore make sense to completely reinvent the brand.

What’s interesting about this is the fact that the transition to electric provides such an ideal moment to do it – when people expect cars to be a bit different anyway, and may be more open-minded about what they buy than they have been in the past. “You’ve seen a slew of Chinese carmakers coming into the industry in the UK, for example, and they’re establishing a foothold that would have been very difficult for them in the past,” Jasper said. China now has a remarkable 76% of the global market.

The other reason for this: electric cars are just … a bit more similar than the petrol kind. “In the past, a Jaguar ad would have been all about what power comes out of the engine,” Jasper said. “All that is absent from what they’re saying here – the only kind of technical aspect anyone cares about is range. So they have to differentiate themselves in other ways.”

The natural conclusion of this is the line in the Jaguar marketing guff that describes the car as a “physical manifestation” of the brand, perhaps in the same way that a loaf of bread is a physical manifestation of Hovis, and my face right now is a physical manifestation of the rolling eyes emoji. And if Jaguar can sell enough brand physical manifestations when they finally put them on the market, all the mockery will have been thoroughly worth it.

What else we’ve been reading

• When ChatGPT first launched, the main worry was about students misusing it for their studies. As it turns out, all kinds of people are using ChatGPT to solve their life problems, including marital issues and sending simple emails. Elle Hunt takes a look at the potential consequences of overreliance on generative AI chatbots can do to us. Nimo

• Austerity architect George Osborne recently took home a million-pound “windfall” from a financial firm he is a partner in – more proof that the ex-chancellor is a “walking advert” for a wealth tax, Polly Toynbee argues. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters

• A $295m (£234m) Florida mansion offers a prospective buyer pretty much every luxury amenity they could think of. One thing it cannot guarantee, however, is protection against the climate crisis, Oliver Milman reports. Nimo

• It’s December, and thus the start of gift guide season. For the Filter, Guardian writers suggest the Christmas gifts they buy again and again for their loved ones, from PJs to peace lilies. Charlie

• There has been a lot of speculation about what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for various issues. Pamela Duncan, Will Craft, Lucy Swan and Heidi Wilson have helpfully pulled together relevant data to lay out what the upcoming Trump term could look like in charts and maps. Nimo

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