There was a time when the shape of a Jaguar was a kind of national signature: the long bonnet, the feline curve, the E-Type that Enzo Ferrari himself was said to admire. Empires lose their colonies; carmakers lose their curves. On Wednesday, the British luxury marque unveiled the machine on which it has staked its survival — and it looks nothing like the Jaguar anyone remembers.
Big, broad and defiantly uncurved, the Type 01 is a fully electric four-door grand tourer, the first vehicle since a radical rebrand that, as CNN reported, caused consternation and sparked a small culture war, with critics calling it “woke.” Its parent company JLR declared in a press statement that the car is “the most technically advanced” and aerodynamic Jaguar ever engineered. It will go on sale in early 2027, with prices starting from £130,000 ($172,000) — firmly at the upper end of the luxury market, and more than double what the old Jaguars tended to cost.
The video with no car in it
To understand the gamble, recall the autumn of 2024. Under the tagline “copy nothing,” Jaguar published a promotional film featuring a diverse cast of models moving through an otherworldly landscape. Notable in it was the absence of any automobile. Traditionalists howled; accusations of wokeness filled the internet. A concept car, the Type 00, followed at Miami’s art show, and in 2024 and 2025 JLR wound down production of nearly its entire old range, the BBC has noted — so that the marque spent a season famous mainly for not selling cars.
“The internet went mad, the anti-woke brigade went mad, even Elon Musk criticized it,” said automotive journalist Mark Smyth. “It threw out everything Jaguar has built over a century, including its customers.”
There is an old pattern here, and one hesitates to name it: governments that cannot reform themselves proclaim revolutions instead. A house that stops building cannot live forever on photographs of the builders. Jaguar’s masters chose fire — they swept away the archive, raised the flag of a new century, and asked the world to forget what the letters on the badge used to mean. Whether that was courage or the final flourish of a company with no other cards left is the question that now sits, five meters long, on the forecourt.
Brutalism at seventeen feet
The car itself is an argument made in metal. “Gone is the curvaceous design legacy of the brand, replaced by brutalist minimalism and cold surfaces,” said Smyth, while also highlighting the car’s cutting-edge technology and engineering. At 5.2 meters (17 feet) in length and two meters (6.6 feet) in width, it is a machine of continental scale. “The Type 01 is probably too big for most UK cities, suggesting the US is its main target market,” Smyth observed.
Writing in The Guardian, the journalist Zoe Williams raised the same objection more bluntly: the Type 01 would be too big, she alleged, “to fit into any UK car parking space,” and it “looks more like a tank than a car.”
Smyth was equally plain about who the machine is built for. “This is not a mainstream production car though, it is a showpiece for the elite,” he said.
Last chance saloon
Stuart Masson, editorial director of the automotive market advisory firm The Car Expert, told CNN the launch is a gamble that could decide whether the company survives at all. “I think Jaguar was a brand that probably more than any other really kind of relied on its heritage and its glory days from in particular the 1950s,” he said. “The rebrand consciously basically just swept all that away in one go and said ‘we’re brand new, we’re starting again.’”
“So it really upended everything that people thought about Jaguar, which was the point, but when you do that you are going to inevitably upset a lot of people who expect the company to be a certain way,” he added.
“The real test,” Masson said, “is how they’re going to go trying to sell an electric Jaguar for more than double the price of what the old Jaguars tended to be.”
“If they’re going to survive they have to do something different, but this is very much last chance saloon stuff for Jaguar,” he said.
So the old marque of Coventry arrives at its reckoning: a car too wide for the island that made it, priced beyond the customers who loved it, aimed across an ocean at buyers who owe it nothing. The heritage was heavy, and they set it down deliberately, in full view. By early 2027, when the first Type 01s leave the showroom, the country that once signed its work in curves will learn whether anyone was waiting for the new signature — or whether the last chapter of Jaguar was written in 2024 by a film that contained no car.