It took over a week, but JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) ultimately denied a report making the claim Gerry McGovern was fired from his position as the automaker’s chief creative officer.
A JLR spokesperson said in an email Automotive News Europe: “It is untrue that we have terminated Gerry McGovern’s employment and we do not intend to comment further on speculative stories.”
The spokesman declined to say whether Mr. McGovern was still employed by the automaker. Mr. McGovern is still listed as JLR’s chief creative officer on the company’s corporate website.
On December 3rd Coach India published a report with several anonymous sources that claimed Mr. McGovern had been fired and “escorted out of the office” at JLR’s Gaydon design studio, about 40 minutes south of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Given the lack of response from JLR and Autocar And Coach India Although accurate reporting of then-CEO Adrian Mardell’s resignation earlier this year came before the official announcement, many believed the report to be factually accurate.
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In the aftermath of the Coach India report, former employees said Hagerty An autocratic boss with an outsized ego, Mr. McGovern was prone to tantrums over everything from misaligned badges to the dirt floor not being spotlessly clean when he arrived.
His leadership style is said to have created a tense and challenging work environment that led to high staff turnover within the design department.
According to many reports, Mr McGovern had a close relationship with the late Ratan Tata, an influential member of the Tata family and sometime chairman of the Tata Group, which owns JLR. That relationship and his power base at JLR reportedly gave Mr. McGovern great influence over decisions within the automaker, including outside of design.
Thanks to his love of mid-century modern design, he drove his team to create designs that embody simplicity and minimalism, an ethos most clearly expressed in the Range Rover range and the reborn Defender.
Mr. McGovern began his career at Chrysler after graduating from the Royal College of Art. He then worked at Peugeot, Rover and then Ford.
At the Blue Oval, he worked in the Lincoln-Mercury division before being named head of advanced design at Land Rover. He stayed with the British company after Ford sold Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors in 2008, later rising to become Land Rover’s chief designer and ultimately Jaguar Land Rover’s chief creative officer in 2020.
In this role, Mr. McGovern appeared before the world’s media to unveil the Jaguar Type 00 concept in late 2024. The bold and controversial concept previews Jaguar’s new design language, which will be used on a range of electric vehicle models designed to transition the brand from BMW to Bentley.
On November 1, 2025, PB Balaji replaced Adrian Mardell as CEO of JLR. Mr. Balaji is the first person from Tata Motors to assume the chief executive position at JLR and was Chief Financial Officer of Tata Motors prior to his appointment as CEO of JLR.
