I am grateful to my good friend and regular reader of my blogs John Mayhead for bringing to my attention the Jaguar story which I had initially missed. Of course now it has got quite a lot of attention but I still thought it worth expressing my views on this extraordinary misstep.

From the time I joined Procter & Gamble as a trainee Sales Representative following graduation from university in 1971, I always had the benefit of a company car. As a Sales Representative that of course made sense and I did very high mileage indeed. When I transferred to brand management at a later stage that did not come with a company car but I was able to take my company car with me. Other jobs followed all of which came with the company car and in 1988 I joined Sony UK as Managing Director of their Consumer Products Company and as a Japanese owned company their rules insisted that the directors of the Company must drive British made cars. That meant that I had a Jaguar for the first time and of course that was no problem for me at all. However when Ford took over Jaguar, I wondered whether this British made rule still applied and I questioned the HR people. I was told that I was quite right it did really make a nonsense of that particular rule and so if I wanted to try another vehicle perhaps a German-made Mercedes or BMW then I could.

However, when I test drove a Mercedes and a BMW, I found them very different from what I was used to. In Jaguar the engineering is so smooth and the German engineering in comparison was somewhat harsh and so I stayed with my Jaguar.  I was able to take it with me on my next assignment and later on bought it outright so there was no question of what my employers’ policies were, I would always have my own Jaguar. That applied until quite recently when I sat down with my wife and said I am going to check over the next couple of months or so just how often both of our cars are out of the garage at the same time. I had my Jaguar and she had her Skoda and we were both very fond of our cars. However the answer to the question was never. There was only one of the cars out of the garage at any point in time and so it was an easy decision to make that we needed to go down to just one car as a household but the more difficult decision was which one. We solved that by deciding to trade them both in and we now have a much smaller and more economical Toyota Prius which is a hybrid and so in a relatively small way we are also doing something to reduce our carbon footprint.

So for over 30 years I was a Jaguar driver and later owner and it would seem from the latest moves by the current Jaguar management that I am no longer in the target audience but from what I have seen it is difficult to understand who is in that target audience. Indeed if there is not such a thing as a target audience. The new management has produced an advert and if you have seen it I think it is possibly the worst piece of advertising that I have ever seen in my life and I have certainly seen a few. It consists of a series of models in brightly coloured clothing emerging from a lift into an austere landscape. They are seen in various poses as different slogans appear on screen including “live vivid,” “delete ordinary” and “copy nothing” but at no point is there any reference to or picture of any car at all. Elon Musk who knows something about cars with his extraordinary development of the Tesla business tweeted on X which he owns by asking “do you sell cars?” This prompted the reply “yes we'd love to show you.” But many others on X and other social media platforms continue to question the advert and what it represented. “Where are the cars in this ad?” one user posted. A second wrote “I thought you guys made cars,” In a news release to accompany the advert, the carmaker described it as part of a “completely transformed Jaguar brand” and “a new era” which makes “it relevant for a contemporary audience.” Well I have no doubt that it is completely transformed and it could even be described as new though whether it is an era is a different story. But how that makes it relevant for a contemporary audience is just meaningless gobbledegook. The managing director Rawdan Glover joined in to try and defend what had happened and said, “this is a complete reset.” That is true. “To bring back such a globally renowned brand we had to be fearless” or indeed stupid. It would seem that Jaguar is somewhat in trouble. If we look at their sales over the past few years, they have declined from 180,198 cars in 2018/19 to just 66,866 cars in 2023/24. My forecast is you ain't seen nothing yet.

I am not a follower of social media at all and so can only pass on what I have heard. That is that there has been a very strong reaction across different social media platforms virtually all of which is negative. The most negative response I personally did see was in The Times last week where their regular correspondent Giles Coren, who normally writes an amusing piece, has written a very angry article headlined “I take Jag’s woeful woke rebrand personally.” He actually sees it as a deliberate attack on the middle classes and he speaks as someone who actually spent time as a brand ambassador for Jaguar where he got a free new car every year with insurance and maintenance taken care of and even tickets to the Jaguar box at Wimbledon. They eventually dropped him along with a number of others to go in a different direction which he says we can now see was as far away as possible from a middle-class white guy with a job and family who can bloody well buy his own Jag.

The new Jaguar range we are told will not contain any petrol or diesel driven vehicles but be entirely electric. This is no question an increasing trend because I have written in these pages before that trend is built on not very solid ground.

First of all you have to make an electric vehicle in pretty much the same way as you make a petrol combustion engine vehicle and that is using quite a lot of steel or aluminium or other minerals that have a substantial carbon footprint in their mining and manufacture. The carbon footprint of an electric vehicle actually starts off by being higher than that of a petrol driven vehicle because the key element in it is the battery which is much heavier and so the vehicle itself is heavier and therefore has a higher carbon footprint. It also does more damage to the road surface and consequent repairs also have a high carbon footprint. The key mineral in the battery is lithium. This is mined in countries like Chile, Peru, and Argentina but most of the market is actually controlled by the Chinese. Then once we get hold of our electric vehicle we have to charge it and where does that charge come from? In this country at present about half comes from oil and gas. We in charging the vehicle are not able to carry as much energy and storage as you can with the petrol driven vehicle and so that means that there will be substantially less fuel available. To compensate for this we will need at least four new power stations and we have not built a new one in decades. I already know people who have tried electric cars and got rid of them because there are so many problems. Jaguar is committing itself to an entirely electric vehicle market, an entirely new target audience if it has any clarity at all about what that is and using advertising which does not even mention or show the product then I can't see any way in which that will be successful.