Jaguar
Jaguar sold 180,833 cars in 2018. Then it deliberately stopped building them, while Range Rover helped Tata Motors to the best profit in a decade.
ALL BREAKDOWNSTHE BREAKDOWN
10/20/20267 min read
Jaguar sold 180,833 cars in 2018. Then it deliberately stopped building them, while Range Rover helped Tata Motors to the best profit in a decade.
The plan now is a £130,000 electric car for people who’ve never owned a Jaguar.
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THE SETUP
Jaguar sold 180,833 cars worldwide in 2018. In April 2025 it registered 49 new cars across the whole of Europe. Now Jaguar has rolled the dice on an all-electric car that starts at £130,000.
Jaguar sits inside JLR alongside Range Rover and Defender. Tata Motors has owned the group since 2008
In FY2024/25 Jaguar shipped 26,862 cars to its dealers. BMW sold that many in about four days
The new car, the Type 01, will be built in Solihull from 2027. At around £130,000 it sits just below most Bentleys, which are built 70 miles up the road in Crewe
Jaguar unveiled its new identity in November 2024 with a film full of brightly dressed models and no car. Elon Musk replied: “Do you sell cars?” For most of the following year the honest answer was no.
There are two separate stories here. The first is a slow decline. In the year to March 2024, eight months before the rebrand everyone laughed at, Jaguar’s sales to customers were already 63% below their 2018 peak. The rebrand didn’t cause that.
The second is a deliberate shutdown. Jaguar ended production of its old range before the replacement existed. That 49-car month in Europe was the strategy being executed. There were almost no cars left to sell.
During this time, Range Rover and Defender were helping JLR to its best profit in a decade.
Jaguar was squeezed from two directions. On one side sat BMW and Mercedes, selling millions of cars and spreading their costs across all of them. Above it sat Range Rover, owned by the same parent and already charging luxury SUV prices Jaguar never reached.
The leadership team picked the space with little competition and a space that wasn’t occupied from within the group: a £130,000 electric grand tourer aimed at people who have never bought a Jaguar.
Range Rover put its prices up because they couldn’t meet demand.
Jaguar is putting its price up in a hope to create that demand.
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THE PLAYBOOK
1. Too small for German economics, too common for Bentley economics
Car companies make money in one of two ways. You sell millions of cars and spread the engineering cost thinly, which is the BMW model. Or you sell very few at very high prices, which is the Bentley and Ferrari model.
Jaguar spent thirty years stuck between the two.
Even in its record year, Jaguar sold less than a tenth of what BMW sells. Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s managing director, has admitted the push into premium volume didn’t work.
Management reckoned it needed around 600,000 cars a year to make the sums add up. Its best year was less than a third of that.
JLR doesn’t publish Jaguar’s profits, but you can see the strain in the cars. The XE was Jaguar’s answer to the BMW 3 Series. It sold about 44,095 cars worldwide in 2016. In Europe, its sales went from 24,461 that year to a few hundred by 2022.
Once volume starts to drop, it feeds on itself. Fewer sales means less money to update the cars. Older cars need discounts to shift and discounts teach buyers to wait for the next deal.
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Takeaway: If your market rewards scale and you’re never going to have it, every new product costs you about the same to build as the leader’s and earns you less. Jaguar paid BMW-sized bills on a fraction of BMW’s sales for thirty years.
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2. Boxed in by its own sister brands
Jaguar did find one way to sell more cars. The F-Pace, its first SUV, became the fastest selling Jaguar ever. It pushed sales up 77% in 2016 and carried the brand to its 2018 record.
The catch was where it put Jaguar. Suddenly it was in the same showroom as Range Rover and Defender. Anyone after a posh British SUV could walk a few meters across the floor and drive off in a Range Rover Velar instead.
Nobody at JLR has said Jaguar was held back to protect Range Rover. They didn’t need to. By the end of 2023, Range Rover and Defender made up 76% of JLR’s order bank. When JLR announced £15bn of spending for the next five years, Jaguar got around £2.25bn of it.
In my view: Every extra Jaguar SUV would have been fighting the most profitable cars in the group. For Jaguar to grow, Tata would have had to pay for a brand whose main job was stealing customers from its best performer. No parent company supports that.
Range Rover had the opposite problem. People were already queueing for its cars, so it kept making dearer versions and they kept selling. Demand for the SV models more than doubled to 4,099 in FY2023/24. One bespoke edition was limited to 20 cars at around £330,000 each, and every one went.
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Takeaway: If you run the smaller brand in a group, work out who your next customer currently buys from before you ask for investment. If the answer is a sister brand making more money than you, the board will say no.
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3. Price first, customers later
In February 2021, Thierry Bolloré, JLR’s chief executive at the time, announced that Jaguar would go fully electric from 2025 and move sharply upmarket. He also cancelled an electric XJ saloon that was reportedly close to finished.
Tata later wrote off £952m and booked another £534m in restructuring costs on the projects JLR dropped, the XJ among them.
There was a logic to it. Starting again from scratch let Jaguar reset its price, on a platform built for Jaguar alone without any crossover with Range Rover. Then the market moved. Porsche’s electric Taycan saw deliveries fall 49% to 20,836 in 2024 and again to 16,339 in 2025. Bentley pushed its all electric deadline back to 2035 and carried on selling hybrids.
Both still had petrol cars to fall back on. Jaguar had gambled without a fallback strategy.
The car Jaguar is betting on is the Type 01, a four door electric grand tourer with a claimed 1,030PS, built in Solihull from 2027. JLR is putting £2.25bn behind it. At £130,000 a car, that’s the showroom price of 15,000 Type 01s, spent before Jaguar has built a single one.
The car Jaguar is betting on is the Type 01, a four-door electric grand tourer with a claimed 1,030PS, built in Solihull from 2027. JLR is putting £2.25bn behind it.
The proof that people want it is thin. Jaguar says around 50,000 people registered interest after the 2024 concept car was shown and 78% of them had never owned a Jaguar. But registering interest just means giving your email address. If one in ten of those people places an order, Jaguar has 5,000 orders. Just to bring in £2.25bn of sales, before it pays a penny to build them, it would need to sell around 17,000 cars at £130,000.
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Takeaway: Putting your prices up works when customers are already waiting, because you know they’ll pay. Jaguar did it the other way round. It raised the price first, aimed the car at people who had never bought one and let its existing customers go. If those new buyers don’t turn buy, Jaguar is in trouble.
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ONE MORE THING
The person who decides whether the Type 01 works sits on a financing desk.
Six figure cars are still sold largely on finance. The monthly payment depends on the residual value, what the lender thinks the car will be worth when the lease ends. On a simple three year deal for a £150,000 car, every 10% knocked off that estimate adds £15,000 to what the driver pays. That’s roughly £417 a month before interest. Real deals vary. The direction doesn’t.
This is where Range Rover’s waiting list add huge value. Buyers who miss out on a new car, will pay a high proce for a nearly new one. High used values make leases cheaper and the waiting list stays full. Jaguar ran the same loop backwards for years. Discounts lowered used values, which raised lease costs, which cost sales.
Electric cars make this harder. A three year old electric car can look dated in a way a three year old Range Rover doesn’t, because the battery and software move on so quickly. Used prices for Porsche’s Taycan and Mercedes’ EQS have both dropped hard.
Jaguar’s own history record won’t help. Its last electric car, the I-Pace, won World Car of the Year in 2019, then Jaguar had to buy back 2,760 of them in the US after repeated recalls over battery fire risk. A lender pricing a Type 01 lease will likely consider that, value the car low in three years’ time and put the monthly payment up.
The Type 01 has no used history at all. A lender pricing it is guessing and cautious lenders guess low. If they do, Jaguar can let the monthly price rise or carry the risk itself by promising a higher future value. Either way, £130,000 price point could become a huge issue for Jaguar
Holding the price doesn’t guarantee a profit either. Bentley sells about 10,600 cars a year and earned a 14% operating margin in 2024, helped by the roughly 70% of buyers who add its Mulliner bespoke options. Aston Martin sold about 6,000 cars at similar prices and made an operating loss.
Jaguar’s roll of the dice looks fifty-fifty at best.
The other interesting point is, that Range Rover and Defender are funding the Jaguar investment. Surely, the question has been asked, what the business looks like without that financial burden.
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THE PAPER TRAIL
City AM: Jaguar bet its history on the Type 01, and it’ll pay off
4 minute read
The bull case, argued with conviction. Read it straight after this to test which side of the bet you are on.
https://www.cityam.com/?p=2463645
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JLR, Reimagine strategy announcement, February 2021
5 minute read
The foundational document. Thierry Bolloré sets the electric-only destination for Jaguar, promises a separate EV architecture and frames the move as a return to luxury rather than a gradual electrification programme.
https://www.jlr.com/news/2021/02/jaguar-land-rover-reimagines-future-modern-luxury-designjlr
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JLR, Jaguar Type 01 UK production announcement, October 2026
5 minute read
The industrial proof that the reset moved beyond brand films. It confirms Type 01 production at Solihull from 2027, with electric drive units and battery packs from Wolverhampton and body panels from Halewood.
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BBC, mixed public reaction to Type 01
5 minute read
The most accessible snapshot of the argument: some see a hearse, some see a future James Bond car, and Jaguar enthusiasts are divided but not uniformly hostile.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6je50ydld31obbc.co
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