Speaker 1: There is a story that when Enzo Ferrari, yes, that Ferrari, first saw the Jaguar E-Type at the Geneva Auto Show in 1961, he called it the most beautiful car in the world. When Frank Sinatra saw it, he is reported to have said, I want that car and I want it

Speaker 2: now. Jaguar is one of the most iconic British brands to ever exist in the car world.

Speaker 1: This is what Jaguar once was, a maker of some of the most desired and admired cars on the planet. Today, however, the story has drastically changed.

Speaker 3: The brand was diluted. The brand equity had been reduced and the vehicles certainly weren't making any profits at all in the past few years.

Speaker 2: It's been somewhat sad to watch the brand struggle increasingly over the last few decades.

Speaker 1: As of November 2024, the company has almost completely shut down production and plans to keep it that way for more than a year. This is a move unheard of in the automotive industry.

Speaker 2: They're going to kind of disappear in the automotive world effectively.

Speaker 1: But Jaguar says this is not the end. The once iconic brand is planning a comeback.

Speaker 4: What we want to do is to say, take us back to the natural habitat by making breathtaking vehicles that really resonate at an emotional level with their clients.

Speaker 3: They believe this vehicle is capable of reinvigorating the brand for the future.

Speaker 2: But this production shutdown is just the first of several risky moves. There are going to be serious consequences. This is going to be a hard one to back out of if they go down this route.

Speaker 1: In May 2024, Jaguar halted production on all the models it makes in its own factories except for the F-Pace, a mid-sized SUV. Jaguar contracts the manufacturer of two of its vehicles, the compact E-Pace SUV and the I-Pace EV to the manufacturer Magnus Steyr. Production on those vehicles will end in December. It stopped selling cars in the UK, its home country, except for those currently in stock. The move comes in the wake of years of sales declines. In 2017, JLR, Jaguar's parent, hit an annual sales record, though that was largely thanks to the success of Land Rover, Jaguar sales hit 178,601 units, a 20 percent increase over the previous year. They hit an all-time high in 2018 thanks to the E-Pace and strong sales of the I-Pace EV. Then things started to slip. By 2023, Jaguar was selling about a third of what it had been in 2017.

Speaker 3: And really the volumes then started slipping off. In 2019, the company overall, Jaguar Land Rover, has made a huge loss of over three billion pounds. And included within that was a huge asset write down for the lost volumes on Jaguar vehicles. And Jaguar never really recovered from that period.

Speaker 1: Today, JLR, which has shortened its name from Jaguar Land Rover, is doing quite well. Once again, that's really thanks to its three lines of muscular SUVs, Range Rovers, Defenders and Discoveries. It pulled in profits of over $2 billion in the last fiscal year and in the first half of this year, $1.3 billion, a 25 percent increase over the same period a year ago. Just five years earlier, JLR was posting an annual loss of about $450 million. Profits are back to the Hallison days. Jaguar has released one EV. The I-Pace came out in 2018. It was the first legacy premium brand to release a fully electric vehicle. The I-Pace was a critical success. Among other honors, it swept the awards at the New York Auto Show. But despite an early surge of interest and large fleet purchases from Google's self-driving arm Waymo, sales of the I-Pace slowed. The company canceled plans to develop two more EVs, an electric version of its XJ sedan and a full size SUV called the J-Pace. But it canceled both in 2021 when JLR first announced its reimagined strategy, which included the plan to turn Jaguar into a high-end, low-volume EV maker. As of 2024, the I-Pace is still Jaguar's only EV. It never received any major updates or refreshes and was one of the vehicles Jaguar has discontinued. Industry analysts and former insiders say the problem for both its EVs and the larger brand is that Jaguar has lost its identity, chasing customers and trying to adapt to the times. The production halt, which is so far planned until at least 2025, is meant to give the brand a chance to return to its original ideals, make truly compelling, quintessentially British sports cars that look and drive like nothing else.

Speaker 3: You've got to be different. You've got to be distinctive to do what they're trying to do.

Speaker 1: Jaguar originated with the Swallow Sidecar Company in 1922, but the first true Jaguar was made in 1935. As with many brands, Jaguar had a key figure who drove its early success, founder Sir William

Speaker 3: Lyons. Sir William Lyons had this idea about grace, pace and space. He added another expression he used, which JLR are using a lot now, is called a copy of nothing. And that's really important. So he really believed he was copying no one.

Speaker 1: These principles produced some incredible cars. Then came the E-Type, the car Enzo Ferrari allegedly gushed over in 1961.

Speaker 4: There was nothing else on the planet that looked like that. To have the courage and the conviction to say, actually, this is what we think a sports car should look like. That's the essence of Jaguar.

Speaker 2: I think Jaguar's kind of unique proposition throughout its history was its combination of driving dynamics and styling.

Speaker 1: In these early years, Jaguar excelled in racing, winning the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans race seven times since it had begun competing in the 1950s.

Speaker 3: Here's Hamilton in the victorious Jaguar.

Speaker 1: That put it just behind Porsche, Audi and Ferrari. In 1948, it had the fastest production car in the world. But as the lion's years drew to a close, the company started to stumble. Like many small automakers, Jaguar changed hands several times.

Speaker 2: Jaguar is another British brand, like so many British brands. Aston Martin is, but the two are kind of similar in so many ways. And that includes this struggle to find economic viability, to have this brand that's super well-known and powerful and desirable and turn that into a business case that is profitable.

Speaker 1: In the late 1960s, the British Motor Corporation, which later became British Leland, bought

Speaker 3: the brand. Sir William Lyons was getting on in years of looking ahead to retirement. I think that's when some of the problems started with Jaguar. Without Sir William Lyons' personal guidance and instructions on how the company should be run, and particularly on design and development of vehicles. No doubt there will be many takers for a prestige name like Jaguar.

Speaker 1: In 1989, Ford Motor Company bought it and eventually housed it in a division called the Premier Auto Group, with a number of high end brands Ford had bought over a several year period, including Aston Martin, Volvo and Land Rover.

Speaker 3: Ford did a lot of really good things at Jaguar. They improved the manufacturing facilities. They put a lot of money into the product investment. They brought some guys over to help running the company under the Ford umbrella.

Speaker 1: The idea, share parts across various brands while enjoying the profits that come with higher pricing. But the deal didn't quite live up to its promise.

Speaker 3: And that got a lot of criticism in the motoring media for Jaguars coming off those Ford platforms. But the vehicles were very capable, they were competent cars.

Speaker 5: You look at those vehicles from that time period, the S-Type, you know, maybe felt more like rebadged Fords than actual Jaguars. When you are selling on fashion and style and brand, it is hard to deliver a product that maybe is, you know, it feels very everyday.

Speaker 2: They didn't seem to really benefit as much as we kind of hoped they might with that kind of infusion of capital that Ford was going to hopefully give them.

Speaker 1: They also made choices that may have damaged Jaguars image, specifically turning it into a high volume producer.

Speaker 3: Jaguar was never really a high volume manufacturer. It was a producer of very distinctive, good looking, high performance sports cars and saloon cars. No wonder Jaguar is an endangered species on Ford's dwindling list of luxury brands.

Speaker 5: Jaguar was a very fashionable brand. And it's hard to keep that up over decades and decades, especially when you go the route of trying to chase more volume. And that's what every car company is tasked with, because at the end of the day, it's great to be cool. But if you're not selling very many cars, your business isn't good. And that's really what you're in business for.

Speaker 3: They never made any money doing it, and it didn't help the brand at all. It weakened the brand significantly until we get to a point where we are the last few

Speaker 1: years. This higher volume strategy continued under Jaguar's current owner, Tata Motors, a subsidiary of the vast Indian conglomerate, which purchased Jaguar along with Land Rover in 2008. Since that acquisition, the two brands fortunes have diverged.

Speaker 4: If I look at its more recent history, it's pursued a strategy of volume over value. It's tried to play in that volume premium space, which is really dominated by manufacturing and purchasing economics. And we've had vehicles that have been really competent, critically acclaimed, but perhaps not unique enough to really compete in that very, very tough segment.

Speaker 1: Starting in 2016, the company had tried to turn to SUVs to keep up with larger market shifts. At first, it worked. There was a midsize F-Pace and a smaller E-Pace.

Speaker 3: Those two SUVs, they were smart looking vehicles, particularly the F-Pace, a very handsome car,

Speaker 1: sold very well. But the brand suffered during the Dieselgate scandal that engulfed so many other automakers.

Speaker 2: Jaguar tried, they tried to have basically Jaguar versions of Land Rover vehicles, share the costs across the two brands, all the things you would want to try to do in that circumstance. But I think at the end of the day, if you're an SUV shopper and you're thinking, well, I could get a Jaguar, I could get a Land Rover, which one do you want to more be seen in?

Speaker 1: It also couldn't achieve the success in SUVs that other sporty luxury car makers such as BMW, Audi and Porsche had managed.

Speaker 2: Porsche successfully transferred the brand into an SUV brand. And I think they did it because they didn't lose their performance cars. Jaguar didn't successfully do is they went so heavy on SUVs and kind of, with the exception of the F-Type, walked away from their performance, sporty coupe history. I think that hurt them.

Speaker 1: Then there are the aforementioned EV efforts, the I-PACE, the cancelled electric XJ and so on.

Speaker 2: I think the Jaguar I-PACE is an example of what happens when you cannot commit to a long-term product plan and then follow through on that and execute and keep updating the model. There just hasn't been enough improvement in the I-PACE.

Speaker 1: So the plan now, stop chasing volume and go upmarket.

Speaker 4: What we need to do now, as I say, is to go back to actually when we were successful, when we made cars that were genuinely that looked like nothing else on the road.

Speaker 1: When Jaguar does return, it will be as a smaller maker of EVs that are expected to start somewhere around $125,000, a price band just above where Range Rover models currently start. It expects to invest about $19 billion in the transition through 2028. The first of three new fully electric vehicles set to launch in 2026 will be a Grand Tourer, basically a larger car that combines speed and comfort. Jaguar says it will be able to travel about 430 miles on a single charge. Tenant says to expect it will have about 600 horsepower and all-wheel drive. A concept car the GT will be based on was revealed at Miami Art Week on December 2nd.

Speaker 4: We have a track record, I think, of bringing concept cars that are very, very close to the production reality. And I'm really confident that in the back end of 25, when we unveil the Ford GT to everybody, they're not going to be disappointed.

Speaker 1: In late November, Jaguar revealed its new brands, emblems and branding strategy. The campaign did receive some backlash.

Speaker 2: I'm not sure I know what's going on in this town. Elon Musk, we should mention, taking a jab at the ad, posting, do you sell cars?

Speaker 4: The eyes of the world are upon us at this point in time, which is exactly what we wanted when we come to unveil our vehicle. And so in that sense, we have everybody's attention. And I think for me, it's fantastic we can now actually talk about the vehicle.

Speaker 3: So this Jaguar has got to have a jaw-dropping wow factor to it. And remember, Sir William Lyons, it's got to be a copy of nothing.

Speaker 1: Jaguar does have some of the assets needed to make this happen.

Speaker 5: It still has such great brand recognition and identity, even though it has gone through a period where it feels very watered down. People still, I think, have very positive emotions towards the brand and they think that it is still aspirational.

Speaker 1: Being a segment of Tata Motors, it has also benefited from the engineering capabilities of Tata Consulting Services, which helped design the dedicated Jaguar electric architecture platform the new cars will sit on. But there are some hurdles to clear.

Speaker 5: I think most people will say on the negative side, oh, they cost a lot to repair. They've had reliability issues.

Speaker 4: We have seen significant reductions in vehicle quality issues. We've seen that reflected in our overall warranty spend. But in terms of if we're going to operate at these elevated price points, quality is a table stake. And that's absolutely understood. We are absolutely embracing that challenge.

Speaker 3: It's profitable without Jaguar sales at the moment. So they're not trying to bet the company on this new car. They're probably betting their reputation on a new car, which is a different thing.

Speaker 1: That JLR is thriving without Jaguar gives it the cushion to launch what many say is a risky endeavor. Among the challenges, one, the higher end EV space is becoming increasingly crowded. Bentley is moving into EVs. Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin are too, even Cadillac with the Celestic.

Speaker 2: I don't know how big the super wealthy electric vehicle market is, but it better be very big because there's a lot of automakers who have decided that's where they're going to make their fortune.

Speaker 1: And the big theme in EVs and cars in general over the last several years has been affordability.

Speaker 5: There's more vehicles than there are consumers in that price range. You look at what Lucid's doing or even, you know, GMC Hummer, all of these very expensive electric vehicles. It seems like it's over-catering to a small market.

Speaker 4: We think there's definitely a white space for us to operate, that it's the top end of the real premium market and probably slightly under the pure luxury players that are in the market. We think that's a place and absolutely validated by all the research we've done on the designs of the vehicles that are coming that says actually Jaguar can absolutely command the volume we require at that price point.

Speaker 1: Brouwer has another reason for skepticism.

Speaker 2: I'm not really a fan of electric vehicles in general. I think they have their applications where they make sense. But the idea that you're going to have a Jaguar-like experience, which is all about emotion and fun and passion, whether it's the look, the sound, the driving dynamics in an electric car, which is kind of the antithesis of that. There is no sound, no hydraulic assisted steering. Obviously, it's electric assisted steering. All the things that made Jaguar great in my mind are kind of neutralized in an electric car experience.

Speaker 3: It is a jaw-dropping design. And I think when I've looked at the specifications of this vehicle, I think they're definitely going in the right place.

Speaker 4: It will actually be our most powerful Jaguar ever. Importantly, it will absolutely drive like the very, very best Jaguar should drive. It should be an incredible touring vehicle to be in.

Speaker 3: What they're doing is very brave. I mean, they could have said, OK, right, we're doing all right with Land Rover. Let's push on with the Land Rover 3 brands, Range Rover Defender Discovery. Let's not bother with Jaguar anymore or let's even sell off Jaguar. They've decided not to do that. Jaguar.