It’s an angular reimagining of one of history’s most beautiful cars.
It’s something you sketched in the margins of a notebook in third grade.
It’s “unmistakable. Unexpected. Dramatic.”
It’s a kid’s car bed with a window air conditioner on the back.
Call it what you will; you’re talking about Jaguar again. That may be all the company needed.
Jaguar just debuted a new concept car meant to light the way to its future designs as it tries to transform into an ultra-luxury brand to compete with Bentley and Rolls-Royce. Like most concept cars, the Type 00 may never be built as a fully functional car.
But the job of a concept car is buzz. This car and the bizarre marketing campaign behind it have achieved buzz.
At 89, an Attempt at Rebirth
Jaguar injected caffeine directly into the veins of internet comments sections in mid-November with a bizarre marketing video meant to start a brand reinvention.
Founded in 1935, Jaguar has been many things in its nearly nine decades. It’s been a racing team that made a few beautiful sports cars for sale for high prices to fund its races. It’s been a division of Ford. It has tried to compete with BMW in sports sedan sales.
The company’s owners believe that, early in the electric era, the brand behind the famous leaping cat needs yet another new strategy. So, they’ve ended production of virtually all of Jaguar’s current products and announced plans to move further up the food chain.
The company says future Jags will all be electric vehicles (EVs). They’ll carry Aston-Martin-like six-figure prices and aim to appeal to a small number of well-heeled shoppers.
With that in mind, the brand released a marketing video filled with models in high-fashion clothes and pithy slogans like “delete ordinary.” It flopped with the public, earning comparisons to 1990s United Colors of Benetton ad campaigns and the “Zoolander” movies that lampooned them.
The rebrand also saw Jaguar change its iconic logos.
But it put Jaguar, with its long-flagging sales, on the minds of millions.
A Concept Car to Keep Them Talking
The Type 00 is the first actual car design Jaguar has revealed that shows where it plans to go. It’s strangely both an obvious Jag and not one. Most of the images Jaguar has provided are computer sketches, though the company plans to debut a physical model in Miami this week.
Its long hood and reared-back proportions resemble those of legendary Jaguars of the 1950s, like the achingly gorgeous E-Type. However, the Type 00 is much larger and interprets the shooting-brake-like shape through an angular lens. It has an almost complete lack of brightwork – the flashy metallic exterior pieces that characterize most car designs.
Its flat nose and slab sides disregard decades of Jaguar designs based on oval shapes and feline proportions.
An E-Type Filtered Through a Prism
Jaguar calls it “unique and different to the norm” and takes “copy nothing” as its new ethos. But the Type 00 copies some things. The no-door-handle look is increasingly common in car designs. Its shape is loosely like that of the Cadillac Celestiq, another all-electric effort from a luxury automaker with a shockingly high price for the brand. Its blocky theme resembles that of the Kia EV9, 2024’s World Car of the Year. Thin vertical panels behind the rear wheels evoke the current Range Rover (penned by the same designer, Gerry McGovern, chief creative officer for both brands).
It has no rear window, aping the Polestar 4.
What none of those cars have is the Type 00’s proliferation of grille marks. Its rear carries a wide grille Jaguar calls “the strikethrough,” which some commenters compared immediately to a window air conditioning unit. A similar faux grille in the front seems less pronounced. The new Jaguar leaper logo behind the front fenders sits on smaller strikethrough plates.
An Interior of Stone and Mood Lighting
Inside, an unrealistically minimalist design includes no screens or gauges to give the driver any information at all when parked. They slide out when needed, Jaguar says.
A “central spine” divides the cabin laterally, splitting floating seats. Incredibly, Jaguar says it’s built from “soothing travertine stone.”
Concept cars, we should note, do not have to pass crash tests.
Three “totems” – one each made of brass, travertine, and alabaster – sit behind a powered panel in the door. The driver can select one and slide it into the center console. That “tailors the mood of the interior. Everything, from the ambient lighting and unique soundscape to the tailored screen graphics, reflect the properties of the chosen material. Bespoke scents interact with the materials for unprecedented personalization,” Jaguar says.
The company has provided no mechanical details.
Precedes a Real Car
Concept cars are almost always unrealistic ideas. But they sometimes preview real cars. Jaguar says the Type 00 carves a path for a production car soon – “an electric four‑door GT – to be revealed in late 2025 and built in the UK.”
In the parlance of automotive designers, a GT is a grand touring car — a powerful luxury car with near sports car performance but a more cushioned ride. Jaguar says that car will offer up to 430 miles of range and be capable of adding 200 miles in as little as 15 minutes from a DC fast charger.
Industry publication Automotive News says the GT model “is targeted to have 1,000 hp.”
Alienating Many Customers on Purpose
From the strange video to the strikingly odd design, the new Jaguar image is earning derision from some quarters. That may be deliberate.
“In a presentation to reporters at JLR’s headquarters in England in November,” Automotive News reports, Managing Director Rawdon Glover, “said the reborn Jaguar brand will not retain most current customers. He said JLR executives estimate just 10 to 15 percent of current Jaguar customers will buy one of the new models.”
But the new models will carry asking prices “twice the price of the current lineup.” The company may be banking on a new iconoclastic image that could attract a wealthy subset looking to stand out. It’s the nature of exclusive things to exclude. The question for Jaguar is whether it can attract just enough buyers from such an exclusive clientele to rebuild its reputation.
