Jaguar’s New Rebrand Marks a New Milestone for the Automaker
The rebrand teases a new concept car, Type 00, and the new tagline “Copy Nothing."
Jaguar is preparing to take on a paradox: becoming the first automaker to recover what it once was by abandoning everything it once was.
Despite building award-winning cars over the last 10 years, it’s been a financial struggle for one of the U.K.’s most historic automakers. Even though Jaguar designed and built machines like the groundbreaking electric I-Pace that became the first car in history to sweep every possible award at the New York International Auto Show, the company’s line was outstripped in sales by its European rivals such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
As a result, Jaguar languished in neutral for the last few years, drifting between identities as a European heritage brand and a midrange luxury carmaker. Late in 2024, Jag finally revealed a plan rumoured to be in the works for several years: to reinvent itself.
First, Jaguar will discontinue its entire current line. Everything it built before 2025 will go away. In fact, that process is largely complete, with only the F-Pace crossover left alive—and that will end production in early 2025. From that point, Jaguar becomes an all-high-end EV brand with a line planned to be no larger than three vehicles.
The first of the new Jags is still unnamed, but it will greatly mirror the new Type 00 concept car the company unveiled at Miami Art Week 2024 this month. While so far its designers and engineers are stingy with power, speed, and acceleration specs beyond its plug-in electric powertrain, early looks reveal the long bonnet and sloping lines of an E-Type but on a vehicle significantly larger than anything Jaguar is building now. In keeping with the Type 00’s size, aesthetics, and technology, would-be buyers can expect a price point marking a 100 per cent rise above anything the brand built for consumers over the last decade.
Throw in a new “artist’s mark,” a sci-fi typeface, and a fine-tuned “Leaper” cat logo, and Jaguar is taking square aim at younger drivers with money to spend.
There’s a wrinkle in all of this talk of 21st-century reinvention. While Jaguar wants to be seen by today’s hyperluxury car buyers as something new and different, it would also like to reforge its identity into what the company was in its heyday.
Turn the clock back to the 1960s and 1970s, and Jaguar was amongst the coolest rides on the planet. The E-Type boasted its creation as “a copy of nothing” and was destined for (and now sits carved into) history’s automotive Mount Rushmore as one of the most iconic cars ever built. Its XKSS was worthy of Steve McQueen. Over the last couple of decades, while Jaguar wanted its multiple and much more sensible models in the circular driveways and three-car garages of suburban families around the world, movie stars and models once made the E-Type and its creator immediate symbols of exotic wealth, taste, and exclusivity.
Jaguar wants that elite status back, and the Type 00 will drive all that rebirth and redesign into Miami while the automotive world awaits the arrival of the first production car marking the brand’s path forward.
