Jaguar For MODERN AUDIENCES
Jaguar, the legendary British auto manufacturer, not the South American bobcat, started life as the Swallow Sidecar company. They made, admittedly, handsome motorcycle sidecars.
They expanded to become the Swallow Coachbuilding Company.
Back in the 1920s, the British favored a model where the car’s chassis, engine, brakes, and engineering guts in general would be built at one company and then taken to a coachbuilder who would fashion a bespoke body for the car.
I know that makes no sense to an American but consider it from the standpoint of European luxury and it fits together better. The chassis was the dirty, smelly, noisy practical side of things. But luxury is impractical, it’s all about beauty, elegance, and a keen eye for detail. These customers preferred engineers to be the black-gang handling the mechanical part and artisanal craftsmen for fashioning the part that was going to be seen by all the people that these customers wanted to make green with envy.
Back when car manufacturing was primitive it worked better than you think it should. However, as the engineering side of things improved, a need for the automobile to be a more integrated and blended whole became unavoidable. So the company that would eventually rename itself after its most popular model eventually became a car company.
But given how it started life, there was always a certain emphasis on style over substance. “The styling could move you, but the engineering frequently couldn’t.”
Speed and style were in the design DNA of every. It was a Jag’s birthright.
In 1948 a postwar Jag created the Jaguar XK120
It was the fastest car in the world (briefly) and arguably the most gorgeous. They were individual, hand-built confections that put Britain on top of European motorsport until a guy from Italy named Enzo came along.
Sure they crashed and burned but so did everything else on the road back then. And if you were going to go out anyway then go in style!
Being driven by the dipshit who wrecked her.
UPDATE: Shit. That’s a Porsche.
Jags frequently found their way into pop culture.
The E-type is often cited as the pinnacle of Jaguar styling.
Note I said styling, I said nothing about engineering. Which was still awful. It would boil over on a warm afternoon and its gearbox was literally designed in the 1940s and “feels like you’re stirring coal.”
Regardless, it was the car of the Cool Sixties. Steve McQueen, Princess Grace, and Frank Sinatra, they all had one. It nearly became James Bond’s ride in Goldfinger but at the last minute was swapped out for its rival from Aston Martin. However, the E-type did make a place for itself in just about every other European movie at the time. Sadly, the best known to the average American is Danger Diabolik.
How to Steal a Million
The above movies raise the darker side of Jaguar’s reputation. It was the preferred car of villains. Both in movies and real life.
The Jag MK X was the company car of the infamous Kray Brothers.
Its somewhat sinister reputation became part of the Jag mystique. A jag was “Cadish without being laddish.” If the owner of a Jag took a hot blonde out for dinner, she’d expect to get stuck with the tab and still sleep with him that night.
Jaguar definitely went into its Wilderness Years when it was absorbed into British Leyland. Being made Ford’s bitch for years didn’t help matters. However, Tata Motors started what looked like a rebirth for Jaguar about ten years ago.
It leaned hard into its villainous reputation when it introduced the Jag F-Type.
Uncompromising style, too much power, and poor detail engineering. Jaguar was indeed back. Sales, however, were not.
And now Jag has launched a new advertising blitz in order to remake itself for mid-2020s and it has people asking…
What the fuck did I just see?
You will note there isn’t a damn car in this car commercial. This is not an ad, it’s an all-out tone-deaf tone poem designed to cut all ties with its 70-year-old customer base.
Look at that stupid logo randomly shotgunning capital letters at the brand. It looks like it belongs on a mall kiosk perfume for trans-women.
I’ll give props to their community manager on X.com who is doing her level best to keep this branding facade intact in the face of a hurricane barrage of rotten eggs and spoiled cabbages being hurled at it day and night. This rebranding has every Woke cliche short of a witch’s coven sacrificing a goat as part of a lesbian marriage ceremony. It feels like someone went to an AI and said, “Create the biggest pile of Woke shit anyone has ever seen, and don’t skimp on the repulsive!!!” If this vision of advertising hell had been shown to Don Draper he really would have jumped out of a window.
Trying to look at why any advertising company with a reputation to worry about would go with this brand demolishing broadside of the bizarre is unbelievably depressing.
Because there’s only one thing this can mean. The rumors are true, Jag is going to be strictly making EV SUVs. It is going from the car of stylish bad boys secretly running the world to the brand of upper-middle-class progressive soccer moms sneaking off to screw her ju-jitsu instructor. That’s the only reason for doing this, they are trying to make something unbelievably bland and banal look stunning and brave. They managed the stunning part.
If this was the plan they should have just retired the brand name entirely or sold it off because the only part of Jag’s heritage that will be in these new rich mom-mobiles is the bad engineering.
