It has no rear window, will not fit into a UK parking space and – starting at £130,000 – ($172,000) is aimed squarely at rich tech industry buyers driving the wide open roads of America.
Jaguar’s electric car, the Type 01, was launched in New York on Tuesday night and marks the culmination of a two-year rebrand that has been one of the most scrutinised in automotive history.
Bosses hope the vehicle will appeal to a younger, richer audience than the manufacturer’s previous “shrinking and ageing” customer base of “men in their 50s”, said Rawdon Glover, 58, Jaguar’s managing director.
With an ultra-long bonnet, low roof and muscular design, the Type 01 is a sharp departure from its predecessor, the F-Type. It is also double the F-Type’s starting price of about £62,000.
Buyers are likely to be rich, “urban” and “very design literate, very technology literate”, Glover said. “The person making this purchase will be choosing the car because it’s a bold choice.”
A senior JLR executive close to the Type 01 project put it more bluntly: “It’s the type of car that you park up and everybody stops and says: ‘Fucking hell, what have you just turned up in?’”
The launch comes at a critical juncture for parent company Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which has grappled with falling sales as cheaper Chinese rivals eat into its UK market share. It is still recovering from a massive cyber-attack last year that cost the economy an estimated £1.9bn.
JLR recently announced 4,000 job cuts in an attempt to save £1.7bn over two years, citing “intense competition and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty”. The Guardian understands Jaguar employees working on the Type 01 programme were offered voluntary redundancy along with the rest of JLR’s non-manufacturing workforce.
The car will go on sale in early 2027, with the first deliveries anticipated in the second half of the year.
“It’s really important that we put Jaguar back on a more solid financial footing,” Glover said. Asked if doubling prices would be effective, he said it was better than “to toil away as we have done for the last two decades in the volume premium space”.
Range Rover also unveiled its first fully electric model in September with a starting price of £154,070 compared with £107,530 for its combustion engine predecessor.
Waning demand in China, a key market for luxury cars, has also hit Jaguar hard. Glover revealed that the Type 01 will not launch in the country for “a couple of years. We’ve decided just to hold off on that.”
However, he added that China would eventually be “an important part of the equation … it’s very difficult for any car manufacturer to exclude the single largest car market in the world”.
PB Balaji, the JLR chief executive, has said the parent company will pivot towards North America and target more sales to millionaires and billionaires to turn its fortunes around.
Glover admitted that while the Type 01’s launch was in New York, it “absolutely” could have been in Silicon Valley instead, reflecting the type of buyer Jaguar is targeting. He recently took a prototype to the offices of Nvidia, the California-based AI company, whose boss, Jensen Huang, had a ride and “loved it”.
The car has no rear window, instead using a rear-facing camera feeding a screen where a traditional mirror would be. The car produces more than 1,000 horsepower and Jaguar says it will travel up to 400 miles on a single charge.
It follows a controversial rebrand that started with an ad in late 2024 featuring stern-faced models without a car in sight. The ad prompted a backlash online and was followed by the Type 00 concept car that was unveiled in “Miami pink”, which Donald Trump described it as “woke” while Nigel Farage said Jaguar deserved to go bust.
Glover admitted the backlash “wasn’t always easy” but added: “The reality is we will need to attract a new audience.”
It is just as well: at 2 metres (6ft 5in) wide the Type 01 will hog the British country lanes frequented by Jaguar’s old customer base, while at more than 5.2 metres in length it will not fit in a standard 4.8 metre UK parking space.
“There are long cars out there on the market,” Glover argued, adding that a Land Rover Defender with a wheel on the back is longer than the Type 01, which he claimed had the “turning circle of a Fiat 500” with its all-wheel steering. “It is incredibly manoeuvrable.”
The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said: “Jaguar’s new EV is a crucial step in JLR’s plans to invest over £15bn in the UK, and another big vote of confidence in our world-class automotive industry.
“This cutting-edge new model being designed, engineered and built in Britain will support thousands of jobs across the West Midlands and North West, and builds on over £1bn of UK automotive investment secured just last month – marking another step forward in our mission to reindustrialise Britain.”
