7:18 am, April 7, 2026
Jaguar managing director Rawdon Glover has spoken out about what it was like dealing with personal attacks in the wake of the company’s rebrand.
Speaking exclusively to the Car Dealer Podcast, Glover revealed what it was like being inside Jaguar when its controversial rebrand exploded across the internet.
The firm relaunched in November 2024 with a social media teaser video that showed sci-fi characters and bold statements – but no car.
It was ridiculed online and blasted ‘woke’ by President Donald Trump, lambasted by Nigel Farage while Tesla boss Elon Musk asked if the manufacturer ‘even sold cars’.
There were hundreds of thousands of comments about the brand online and for three days straight it was the most talked about thing on the internet.
Glover was personally attacked in a number of comments on social media while some staff even received death threats.
Jaguar director Santino Pietrosanti was also targeted in a series of articles by the Daily Mail which have since been removed from the newspaper’s website.
Glover spoke at length about what it was like being behind the scenes at Jaguar during this extraordinary time for the brand in the third episode of our special Podcast series Jaguar Rebrand: Mistake or Genius? You can listen to it now on your favourite podcast platform including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
He said: ‘Personally, I felt a great amount of responsibility to the team here.’
He explained it was a ‘tough time’ for a number of the individuals on the receiving end of that online attention.
‘I felt a responsibility to look out for them,’ he added. ‘I felt a responsibility to defend what we’re doing and to defend them.
‘If I think about things that are written about me, less so really. Because if somebody writes something on social media about me and I don’t know who they are… why would their opinion matter?’
Glover also tells the podcast about the moment Elon Musk tweeted about Jaguar as the brand started to go viral on social media.
He said: ‘It’s quite surreal looking back on it now. It’s almost like it happened to somebody else.
‘I do remember exactly where I was when Elon Musk had tweeted and we were like, “well, what do you do with that? How do you respond to that?”
‘I wouldn’t say we were walking around high-fiving. We weren’t also walking around with our head in our hands thinking, oh my goodness, the person with the most reach on social media anywhere has just posted.
‘We responded to Elon. We actually invited him to Miami to the launch. We said, “you should come and join us for a cup of tea.” He didn’t join us.’
Jaguar on why it needed to relaunch
Glover also spoke about why Jaguar needed to relaunch in such a bold way.
As part of the rebranding it has shed most of its dealers, explained only 10% of its current owners will buy its new car and said it will launch an electric GT car at a £120,000 price point.
He said: ‘Jaguar was becoming less and less relevant in commercial terms. The range we had was connecting to a smaller and smaller audience.
‘Jaguar needs to change – commercially it needs to change. We think we need to make a big bold step rather than just small iterative changes to the brand.’
He said that before the relaunch the brand was not ‘commercially viable’ and competing with big German manufacturers was almost impossible.
‘If I think about the main competitors in that space, they’ve got a completely different operating model,’ he explained.
‘Volkswagen Group is buying components for 10m cars, not 300,000 or 400,000 cars. Look at the manufacturing efficiencies they’ve got. Look at the platform efficiencies they’ve got.
‘So the ability for Jaguar to really compete in that space was very challenging.’
To make the brand stand out, Glover said the launch needed to be ‘a big bold step’ rather than ‘small iterative’ changes, hence the huge rebranding.
However, he said JLR was not expecting the video to go viral and said it was never intended as a ‘social or political’ statement.
He added: ‘It’s probably fair to say that for a period, it was very difficult to control the narrative, particularly when much of that plays out on social media.’
Glover said that now his job was to ‘secure the next 90 years of Jaguar’.
‘We talk about being a custodian of a brand,’ he added.
‘That’s why everybody involved with Jaguar, me included, are here.
‘The brand is permanent. My tenure will be temporary.’
You can listen to the interview with Rawdon Glover in full in episode 3 of Jaguar Rebrand: Mistake or Genius?. All episodes are available now wherever you get your podcasts. A video of the podcast – complete with mics and cuts – has been published on our second YouTube channel CarDealerMagazine2 and at the top of this post.
