In recent years, the automaker Jaguar hasn’t attracted much attention, but in the last few days, that’s all changed! Last week, the company announced that it had abandoned its growling cat design in favor of a minimalist Bauhaus-style logo, which was met with a fair degree of shock. Now the company has unveiled the Type 00 concept car (this is a photo, not an illustration), which is very different from anything it currently produces, to put it mildly.
The most noticeable are the length, especially in the nose, and the low roofline. From some angles, the new car looks like a computer rendering that has not been fully completed, especially the blocky front and rear. Other design features are very futuristic/whimsical, such as the brass stripes running down the middle and sides, the oval steering wheel, the folding interior screens, the butterfly doors, and the travertine stone “plinth” separating the passenger and driver compartments.
All of this is part of Jaguar’s new “copy nothing” ideology, designed to break away from current models. “When Jaguar was at its best, it threw out the automotive design rule book and created the E-Type and XJS. They were objects of desire,” said Jaguar’s chief creative officer at Miami Art Week.
Jaguar (which has been owned by India’s Tata Motors since 2008) plans that the production version will have a range of up to 430 miles and fast charging that will add 200 miles of range in just 15 minutes. Other specs, such as acceleration and top speed, have not been revealed, and production models are likely to lack some of the richness of the concepts.
Some critics greeted the changes with derision, but Jaguar said the company is committed to being disruptive. “We’ve certainly attracted a lot of attention over the last few weeks,” Managing Director Rowdon Glover told Sky News. “We have to make sure that Jaguar is relevant, desirable, forward-looking for the next 90 years of its history.”
