Jaguar reinvents itself

PORTLAND, Oregon – The new offices of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) The offices in the heart of Portland look more like those of a Silicon Valley tech startup than a company that has been making cars for 90 years. Large open spaces, long tables with monitors to which you can connect a laptop, glass-walled conference rooms, a landscaped interior courtyard with Wi-Fi… only the garage at one end of this completely remodeled industrial building gives us clues about the nature of its new tenant: a Range Rover covered in a camouflage wrap, a Jaguar F-Pace, a Defender 110, among other cars from the group.

But in a couple of years, the car park of this innovation office at JLR – which features a room with a huge simulator where engineers test different screens and forms of interaction between humans and cars – could look very different. Because one of the group’s brands is undergoing a profound change.

Jaguar is reinventing itself. And it is doing so in two directions. On the one hand, wants to stop being the “premium volume” brand that it has tried to be for the last 25 years and “rise” and to take it one step further in terms of exclusivity and luxury. “Back to its rightful place,” in the words of Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s Managing Director for just over a year. On the other hand, All new vehicles will be fully electric from now on (without stopping production of the current gasoline models, but without major developments).

This process of reinvention began three years ago and includes both the brand and its products. Regarding the first, The parent company changed its logo and officially adopted the initials JLR to identify itself.. The “Land Rover” branding took a backseat to focus on its four “families”: Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and JaguarThe latter will soon see its logo redesigned as well.

Regarding the products, that is, the new Jaguar cars that are coming, we not only know that they will be 100% electric, but they share a new platform, the Jaguar Electric Architecture (JEA)which will give rise to three models.

The first Jaguar of the new era

The first will be a 4-door GT that will start at over $100,000. It will be revealed before the end of 2024 and will arrive in dealerships in the United States in the third quarter of 2025, says Joe Eberhardt, CEO of JLR for North America.

It will have “exuberant proportions,” according to Glover. “It doesn’t look like other EVs”And Jaguar is following the maxim of its founder, William Lyons: “Jaguar achieves its best when it does not copy anyone.”
JLR promises that this vehicle will have a range of more than 700 kilometers (435 miles) on a full battery charge and a charging capacity of up to 80% in 20 minutes. It will be compatible with Tesla’s network of chargers and sales volumes are not expected to be very high. In its most powerful version it will exceed 1,000 horsepower..

Jaguar’s other two new electric vehicles will arrive later. Nothing has been announced about them, but it seems clear that one will be an SUV and the other a compact or crossover with a price lower than the GT that will kick off the new era for Jaguar.

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