Jaguar – creating an endangered species? | Axon’s Automotive Anorak

Today the situation for each of these car marques is a very different one, with all of them now offering a broad range of models to choose from, spanning a number of different vehicle segments to meet new car buyers’ tastes and demands.

Jaguar is shortly set to become an outlier here, however, by making a considerably slimmer range of new models (i.e., no models at all in most established key markets) available to potential clients wanting a brand-new Jaguar car.  The prestigious Coventry car maker has some previous recent history here. After 106 years of continuous production, in 2002 Jaguar unceremoniously dropped Britain’s oldest vehicle marque – the renowned Daimler, which it had acquired in 1961 – only to briefly revive the Daimler name in 2005, before killing it off for good in 2009, under pressure over the use of the name form its arch rival Mercedes-Benz.

Bizarrely, now, in a totally unprecedented move that suggests the ultimate in poor and narrow-sighted forward product planning, JLR is about to temporarily kill off Jaguar. By withdrawing its entire existing range of five distinct models, from its entry XE upwards, it leaves its franchised dealer network with no new cars to sell at all, forcing them to rely solely on used car sales, plus parts and servicing to make any money at all.

Thankfully, very few solus Jaguar dealers now remain, most being joined with their Land Rover partners. JLR will have to rely upon the latter to keep its dealer network alive in the short-term until 2025, in readiness for JLR to reposition Jaguar as a pure-electric luxury car brand, intended to do battle with Bentley and the more premium German marques.

Jaguar's strategic decision to become a luxury electric car brand from 2025 has enormous consequences for dealers and means that JLR dealers won’t be selling many (or any) new Jaguars at all for the remainder of this year and for the majority of 2025. JLR had already announced that it would be ending production of the Jaguar XE and XF saloons, and the sporting F-Type earlier this year (the F-Type representing 76 years of post-war sporting Jaguar production) and more recently it confirmed that it would axing the E-Pace small SUV by the end of 2024. This left only the electric I-Pace as the sole new Jaguar product for its dealers to sell, but that Austrian-built model is now also set to be dropped from the Jaguar range as it said not to contribute a useful profit.

Speaking recently to selected automotive media, Jaguar’s Managing Director, Rawdon Glover, said, “we will no longer be on sale for new vehicles” in specific European markets by the end of 2024, with the UK to follow “from the early part of next year.” He added ominously, “there will be a period where you will not be able to buy a Jaguar,” as a repeat of the same treatment Daimler suffered 15 years back.

Rawdon added: “Jaguar needs to make space in its model range and factories before its switch to becoming an electric brand in 2025. For this reason, production and sales of all the current Jaguar models will gradually be discontinued. Sales of the current range will end everywhere in twelve months at the latest. In the UK, however, this will apply from the beginning of 2025 (with a few run-out F-Pace models potentially available) and in some other European markets from the end of 2024, so Jaguar dealers should concentrate on the used car business and customer service during this time.” It seems they won’t have much alternative!

As for would-be new Jaguar customers and its loyal bunch of brand enthusiasts, the temptation to consider and go and test drive one of Jaguar’s many competent overseas rivals must now look sadly more tempting, as who will want to invest in a current outgoing model that its own creator has already consigned to the history books? 

As Jaguar is kept busy ‘reinventing’ itself as luxury electric car maker, its old familiar ‘Grace, Pace, Space’ marketing line as a producer of outstandingly good value prestige cars looks also set to form part of its history. The all-new electric Jaguar model is expected to be a luxury four-door GT with a starting price of at least £100,000+, positioning it far more exclusively than any previous Jaguar.

The new electric Jaguar GT is currently set be revealed in December this year, but won’t go on sale until 2026, meaning that Jaguar showrooms will be quiet places to visit for quite a while. Once the new Jaguar GT finally arrives in early 2026, it is believed that it will be a further two years before the single model range will be expanded to include a Bentley Bentayga-rivalling SUV, plus a large four-door saloon to compete with the Bentley Flying Spur.

That’s a long wait, and to the best of my knowledge a historical first, as I cannot think of a single car company that has ever intentionally stopped production of its entire model range and knowingly left its franchised dealer network with nothing new to sell while it develops a new model. I can only hope that the new all-electric Jaguars are worthy of the name and worth the wait. After all, we don’t want Jaguar to be added to the list of endangered species.

Main image courtesy of Getty Images.