Jaguar will be relaunched as an exclusive, super-luxury all-electric brand, with the first new EVs of this era landing in buyers’ driveways from 2025.
Based on the new in-house developed architecture, dubbed JEA , which shares nothing with existing Jaguar and Land Rover platforms, or the upcoming EMA platform future Land Rover EVs, Jaguar’s first car from its brave new project will be a four-door GT.
The automaker says it will release more details about the new car later this year, but for now it has revealed it will have a driving range of up to 700km, and prices will start from £100,000 ($185,000) in the UK.
This will put the GT, and the rest of the new Jaguar range, well beyond where the current range resides, but still below ultra-luxury brands, like Bentley.
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Jaguar XJ
For reference, the current Bentley Flying Spur sedan starts at £156,000 ($290,000), while the top-spec variants of the now discontinued XJ began from around £92,000 ($170,000). The existing XF range tops out at about £52,000 ($96,000).
The new electric GT will go on sale in selected markets in 2024, but the first cars won’t be delivered until 2025.
Following on from the four-door grand tourer, Jaguar plans to launch two more cars based on JEA. These are widely expected to be crossovers. All three electric cats will be built in JLR’s Solihull factory on the outskirts of Birmingham.
To coincide with today’s announcement, the company released the first teaser image of the new four-door GT.
While it’s hard to see what the new Jaguar will look like from this picture, Gerry McGovern, JLR’s chief designer, says: “We have radically reimagined Jaguar as a modern luxury brand. The key to Jaguar’s transformation is that the designs convey that they are a copy of nothing.”
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Jaguar E-Pace
Eventually all of the brand’s existing vehicles — the XE, XF, E-Pace, F-Pace, I-Pace, and F-Type — will be discontinued, leaving behind a super-luxury, all-EV range.
According to Autocar, the reimagined Jaguar is targeting around 50,000 sales globally for its high-end EVs. That’s not far removed from the 70,000-odd Jaguars sold in the 2021/2022 financial year, but it’s a far cry from earlier aspirations.
Since Ford purchased Jaguar in 1990, the automaker has dreamt about becoming the British version of BMW. However the retro-styled X-Type and S-Type not only failed to dethrone the 3 Series and 5 Series, but didn’t even manage to breach the outer walls of the castle.
Even after Tata bought the company in 2008, the similarly-pitched XE and XF was lapped in the sales race by its German competitors.
Not long after Thierry Bollore took control of Jaguar Land Rover in late 2020, Jaguar scrapped the nearly-complete next-generation electric XJ, and targeted going fully electric from 2025 with a more exclusive range of vehicles.
