7:20 am, April 7, 2026
Jaguar’s relaunch was mired in controversy, but now, 18 months on from an event that nearly broke the internet, the British car maker is preparing to launch its all electric future.
Car Dealer has spoken to a host of experts to discuss the relaunch for a special video and three-part podcast series.
We asked why they thought Jaguar needed to be so dramatic and, with the car’s launch just a few months away, do they think its bigger problem might actually be its timing?
Our video can be watched at the top of this post and the first episode of the podcast series is out now on your favourite podcast platform including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
In 2024, Jaguar’s now infamous rebrand was met with a vicious reaction online with its sci-fi model marketing movie branded by some as ‘woke’.
Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and Elon Musk piled in – labelling it a disaster – and then two weeks later came the car.
The Type 00 was the bright pink concept car launched at an art fair in Miami and caused as much of a stir as the teaser video.
But what was it about that campaign that caused so much controversy?
‘I think it was badly timed,’ said Ray Massey, motoring editor of the Daily Mail.
‘If they’d done that 18 months or two years earlier, they might have got away with it.
‘But by late 2024, there was already a backlash against what people call “woke” – rightly or wrongly – and they walked straight into that.’
Episode 1, The Journalists’ View
Massey believes the marketing was ‘out of step’ with the mood at the time and he could understand why the ‘androgynous’ characters in the video were lambasted by Trump and Musk.
The Daily Mail motoring editor thinks Jaguar got the ‘tone wrong’ and, despite wanting to see the British brand succeed, he believes the firm is still in ‘denial’.
Massey was at the launch in November 2024 and said it was one of the most ‘bizarre’ events he had attended in his 40-year career as a journalist.
Other writers at that event were also bemused by the stark marketing messages Jaguar presented which included a promise to ‘delete ordinary’ and ‘copy nothing’.
That event was led by the then chief creative officer Gerry McGovern who told journalists this was a ‘complete reset’ for the brand. He has since left the company.
‘If I was to put it into one word, I would say bold and brave,’ said Steve Fowler, The Independent’s electric cars editor and one of the most experienced motoring journalists in the UK.
Fowler has edited Autocar, What Car? and Auto Express during a career that spans decades. He’s also been at pretty much every JLR launch during that time.
‘Part of me at the time was thinking foolish as well, but for Jaguar – what else could they do? It was a failing business, so something had to be done.’
Fowler explained there had always been a lot of focus on the Jaguar brand from the UK media, but this relaunch saw it written about across the world.
He added: ‘I was surprised at the vitriol. Maybe that’s just the world we live in now. I think the spiteful nature of some of the comments was surprising and probably not deserved.’
Ginny Buckley, editor in chief of Electrifying.com, said nothing had prepared her for the moment ‘Jaguar unveiled a big pink car’.
‘I think extraordinary is the only word you can apply to what Jaguar have done over the last 18 months,’ she said. ‘And if I had a second word, I’d say bloody brave because it’s a bold thing that they’ve done.’
All the journalists I spoke to were in agreement, though, that Jaguar needed to do something.
Why did Jaguar need to relaunch?
For years, Jaguar had been trying to compete in the hyper-competitive luxury premium segment.
Battling the big three German rivals – BMW, Audi and Mercedes – was always going to be tough for a smaller scale business like JLR and eventually management caved and called time.
The relaunch saw Jaguars taken off sale in what the firm called a ‘fire break’ between the old and the new and at the same time dealership numbers were slimmed down from around 80 to less than 20.
‘It was quite clear they had to do something,’ added Buckley. ‘What they were doing wasn’t working.’
Stuart Gallagher, editor of Evo magazine, added: ‘They had to do something. As they said at the time, Jaguar was going nowhere.
‘They couldn’t go back into that volume premium space, because everyone appears to be a volume premium brand.
‘You have to put a line in the sand and move on otherwise you just get, “nice old Jaguar”, and that hadn’t worked.’
Jaguar ditched a model range that included small and medium sized SUVs in the E and F Paces, a critically acclaimed sports car in the F-Type and a range of saloons in the XE, XF and XJ. In their place, an electric GT car would arrive some time in 2026.
Professor David Bailey, from the Birmingham Business School, said the shift up market ‘made sense’ and it was something JLR had already managed successfully with its Range Rover brand, phishing prices well above £100,000 for new models.
However, the timing of a premium electric car launch could be the issue.
Episode 2, The Controversy
Bailey said: ‘Repositioning towards the luxury end is probably the way to go. Taking on Rolls-Royce and Bentley, though, is going to be difficult.
‘They don’t seem to be doing that head-on. What they appear to have identified is a sub-luxury space between the top end of premium and the bottom end of luxury, and that’s where they’re going first.
‘But whether there is actually a luxury electric market is another matter entirely, because what we’re seeing is the likes of Bentley and Rolls-Royce rowing back from some of their electric ambitions because of slow take-up.’
Rolls Royce has just canned its plan to be fully electric by 2030 and Bentley has pushed its target to be fully EV to 2035 – focussing instead on plug-in hybrids.
Bailey added: ‘I think timing is a real issue. Demand for electric vehicles is growing, but not growing quickly enough.
‘This is a bespoke platform for Jaguar, so it’s very expensive for them to do this. And I’m not entirely sure there really is a luxury electric car market yet. So they are going to have to go out and create one, and that will be very challenging.’
To push the brand up-market, Jaguar needed to make some noise and it did that with an initial teaser campaign that faced a backlash online.
The car maker saw mentions of the brand surge 10 times from around 40,000 a week to more than 725,000 the week after the announcement.
That teaser video (above) had tens of thousands of comments on YouTube and the campaign reached 70m users on social media in seven days.
If it was noise Jaguar wanted, they got it.
‘I don’t think it was intended to be as provocative as people interpreted it,’ said Jon Evans, host of the CMO Uncensored Podcast and someone who has closely followed the marketing story that unfolded from Jaguar’s rebrand.
‘This was about signalling a complete change – going back to the idea of being a “copy of nothing.” It was designed to grab attention, and it was deliberately timed ahead of the concept car launch as part of the communications strategy.
‘What they didn’t anticipate was the timing. It came just after the Trump election, when there was already pushback against what people call ‘woke’ advertising. That definitely amplified the reaction.
‘So yes, it was planned – but the scale of the response wasn’t.’
Evans labelled the campaign as ‘marketing genius’ and said that the brand had to do something after years of decline. He said there was ‘no amount of money’ that could have got them the same level of attention as the teaser campaign did.
Branding and PR expert Nick Ede didn’t agree. He was quoted extensively by the national newspapers after the campaign and told Car Dealer it felt like an ‘April Fool’.
‘I think people see it as a bit of a joke brand now, to be honest,’ he said.
‘The advertising didn’t really show you what the vehicle was. It felt more like an advert for a Magnum ice cream than it did for a car.
‘Jaguar is seen as a heritage brand and has been associated with the royal family. I think they were probably thinking, maybe we can make this a bit more Dubai, give it that bling vibe, and appeal to younger millionaires who don’t want the old style but might want the new one.’
What did car dealers think of the Jaguar relaunch?
At the same time as unveiling a new logo and look for Jaguar, the firm said it would be leaving as much as 90% of its previous owner base behind.
With the new electric Jaguar priced at around £120,000, there would be few current owners who would transition along with the firm, or move to electric.
Tim Atkinson, a used Jaguar specialist, runs Sports & Touring in Andover, Hampshire. He told Car Dealer that many of his current customers didn’t get the rebranding, even if he did think it was genius.
He said: ‘A lot of them didn’t like it. There’s a fierce loyalty among Jaguar customers that goes back a long way, and many weren’t open-minded about the change.
‘But importantly, much of that reaction wasn’t really about the marketing. It was about the move away from internal combustion. They felt let down by that, and that frustration came out as criticism of the rebrand.’
He described a typical buyer for his mostly F-Type stock as ‘white, middle-class British male, aged 50 to 70’.
Peter Smyth is a director of the Swansway Group, a previous Jaguar dealer and one that lost the franchise in Crewe as part of the reset. He still represents Land Rover.
He said: ‘If you actually looked at the demographics of our customers, it isn’t unusual to see a box of tissues on the back shelf and a trilby. They were quite old.
‘I think it had become a little bit of an old, staid type of brand. Now, that did change a little bit with the SUVs, but I think people regarded Jaguar as an old person’s car. And I think it needed to be made sexy.
‘So I actually understand the direction they’ve gone in.’
The big question now, though, is whether this huge gamble will pay off. As rolls of the dice go for car firms, never has so much been riding on one hand.
‘They’ve bet the house on it,’ said the Daily Mail’s Massey. ‘Cats have nine lives. I’m not sure what number Jaguar is on…’
You can hear what these experts and more told us about the Jaguar relaunch in a special three-part podcast series Jaguar Rebrand: Mistake or Genius? out now on your favourite podcast platforms.
