Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know Jaguars controversial decision to become a more exclusive, all-electric brand, publicized through a garish and widely criticized advertising campaign.
However, had the decision not been made to switch the Indian-owned British car brand from BMW to Bentley, Jaguar might have had a revitalized portfolio that would have included a new flagship SUV and a new sports car.
Ian Callum, who was Jaguar’s design director until 2019, said during a live recording of the Autocar My week in cars podcast that when he left the company he was working on a new SUV to replace both the F-Pace and I-Pace; a new sports car to replace the F-Type; and a new flagship, the Range Rover-sized J-Pace SUV.
The next-generation XJ sedan (X391 series) was designed with a single wheelbase length rather than separate short and long wheelbase configurations, a move BMW also made with its latest 7 Series and i7 models.
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It was also designed to accommodate an internal combustion engine, again similar to BMW’s latest flagship – and something that would have worked well given the recent decline in demand for high-end electric vehicles.
“I thought (the next-generation XJ) was quite nice… It was bigger. We wanted the car to be more stately, which I always fought against because I always felt Jaguar was more racy than stately, but we produced something that was actually very stylish and worked well, and it was a purely electric car,” Mr Callum said on the podcast.
“However, it was designed to accommodate a six-cylinder engine if necessary,” he added, probably meaning that it would have shared the six-cylinder engines with the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, which also featured the Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA).
That’s in contrast to Jaguar’s upcoming flagship, which is based on the Type 00 concept and doesn’t support internal combustion engines despite an exceptionally long hood.
And speaking about long bonnets on electric cars, Mr Callum said: “I look at all these new electric cars and they look like they were designed 20 years ago. I don’t understand why they have long bonnets.”
“Why build an electric car with a long hood?” he considered. “There’s no V12 in there.”
The XJ was intended to be all-electric before demand for high-end electric vehicles (EVs) collapsed. But long before that, the sedan was destroyed in the eleventh hour by Thierry Bolloré, the short-lived JLR CEO who was only at the helm from 2020 to 2022.
“Julian (Thomson) took over (from me as design director), then there was a lot of trouble… At that point new management came in and all those beautiful cars stopped,” Mr Callum said on the podcast.
The production version of the Type 00, so far the only new-era Jaguar to be revealed as a concept, is now due to be unveiled in 2026 after a recent delay.
However, Mr Callum admitted that Jaguar’s previous strategy of being Britain’s BMW was not working in its favour.
“That was perhaps part of Jaguar’s problem. We were racing against the German brands, too obviously against them,” he said, referring in particular to the XE.
“The
“That was Jaguar’s biggest mistake. It frustrated me. It wasn’t necessarily the quality, it wasn’t the performance, it wasn’t the handling, I don’t think it was the design. It was the fact that it was too expensive to build – that was the biggest mistake.”
“We couldn’t compete with the Germans on that front. There is no advantage of scale – 40,000 cars versus half a million.”
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