If You’re The Kind Of Person The Jaguar Type 01 Is Designed For, You Better Buy It

Finally. Finally. After what feels like the longest and most contentious strip tease in automotive history, the Jaguar Type 01 has been revealed. Although I’ve been on my death bed with consumption or the vapors or some other equally glamorous ailment for the last couple of weeks, such is my dedication to you, the little people, that I managed to stay up until 1am last night, refreshing the Jaguar YouTube channel in anticipation of watching a glitzy, New York reveal.

And as my bedside clock ticked past the anointed hour, nothing happened. A quick Google revealed all the usual media outlets had posted their pre-prepared videos and stories, and as I was sick and grumpy, I looked at a few images and went to bed. Pouring over social media and the press images this morning, it all feels like a bit of an anticlimax. We already had a pretty good idea of what the new Jaguar was going to look like, because they had shown the Type 00 Concept over a year ago, and revealed the interior of the production version a few weeks back at Monterey Car Week. Whether this prolonged media strategy was planned or a result of the usual JLR asshattery doesn’t really matter. By the very nature of familiarity, the new Jaguar Type 01 exterior design cannot stun in the same way the concept did at Art Basel in Miami nearly two years ago.

I’m always saying that to truly understand a car you need to see it with your own eyes in the metal, and so it was when I finally saw the Type 00 Concept at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2025; I understood what Jaguar was trying to achieve. It was a car to make an impact. A wheeled cinder block chucked through the stained-glass window of automotive norms. The dreaded bold reimagining? Jaguar was burning the down the house and starting again in a completely different zip code. Amid all the brouhaha two years ago, I gathered my thoughts about why that was necessary here, but what is important to understand is Jaguar as a car company was fucked. In fact, they were turbo fucked with a capital F.

I highlighted in that piece that Jaguar’s problems went back decades. Although it was profitable in the mid-eighties, the company itself was a shambles with outdated working practices and ramshackle production facilities as a result of chronic under-investment by its founder, Sir William Lyons, and then latterly British Leyland. What I hadn’t realized at the time, but I have since learned because my current bedtime reading is a history of said British Leyland (it’s all rock and roll over here), is that Jaguar constantly blew it as early as the late sixties. Although labor disputes and gathering economic storms were beginning to affect the UK across all industries, Lyons’ ambivalence to his workforce and their unions, coupled with inconsistent government meddling, meant that although Jaguar had a world-beating product with the XJ, it could not be built fast enough or well enough. Waiting lists stretching to two years and cars rolling off the line with parts missing meant would-be XJ buyers soon got fed up and took their money to Mercedes with its outstanding new S-Class.

Basically, Ford massively overpaid for a pup and tried to recoup their losses by aiming for the Germans, a losing strategy that continued under Tata. If it wasn’t for the Land Rover side of the business keeping everything afloat, Jaguar would have been worm food years ago. Ian Callum has been doing the rehabilitation media rounds of late, lamenting what could have been, and talking about how much Jaguar spent on the suspension components of the XE in an attempt to ensure it drove better than a 3-series. Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but customers can’t see suspension components. What they can see is interiors, which in the XE is where the money should have been spent. But all that is ancient history now, and we are where we are. So with regards to the Type 01, where exactly are we?

The truth is nobody knows. The EV market overall is softening, and OEMs who bet big on the transition like VAG are now neck-deep in shit. While there is undoubtedly a core market that is settling down for EVs in terms of everyday runabouts and crossovers for normal people, beyond that it’s chaos. Porsche, whose product mix strategy seems to be changing on a weekly basis, is watching Taycan sales fall off a cliff and has recently offloaded Rimac and Bugatti in an attempt to balance the ledger and re-focus the brand. Lucid, probably the closest analog to what Jaguar is trying in terms of price and volume, continues to flounder and undershoot sales estimates. Lotus and Rolls-Royce have seen their EV cars plod along steadily, but Ferrari has stated the controversial Luce has sold out through to 2027. So what’s going on in the high-end EV market? To quote the immortal Private Hudson: you tell me man, I only work here.

In the face of all that current uncertainty, Jaguar’s decision to go all in on a new luxury EV is a strange one. But it probably seemed like the right move five years ago when the Type 01 was signed off for production. I’ve heard that clay modelers were working under social distancing conditions when sculpting the production models. When JLR Design Development Director Andy Wheel (full disclosure, he was my line manager) is talking about maintaining Jaguar heritage, I don’t think he meant the decade-plus it took to get the XJ40 into showrooms. The EV version of the full-size Range Rover, which was designed while I still had a high security pass, was repeatedly kicked down the road and finally launched last week, about three years too late. It seems the ghost of British Leyland casts a long shadow over its children.

The Type 01 was signed off in about 2021, and then the concept was reverse-engineered from that. This is an extraordinarily long development program, even for a completely new platform. Which makes it all the more surprising to me how compromised some parts of the Type 01 appear to be. For a start, it’s a big old bus at 5200mm (205”) long with a whopping 3200mm (126”) wheelbase. For comparison, the Cadillac Celestiq is 5517mm (217”) long with a 3308mm (130”). I was under the impression Jaguar was going to use this length, and the consequent expansive dash-to-axle ratio, to package the cells in front of the firewall. This would allow them to have a low roofline with no reduction in interior space. What they’ve actually done is kept the cells in the floor, removed some from the rear passenger footwell, and placed one cell pack and the battery management modules ahead of the firewall. And still kept the super low roofline. As a result, the Type 01 looks very cramped inside, making it a very large 2+2 GT. Exacerbating this are the pint-sized doors, meaning ingress and egress are a more awkward experience than it should be for a luxury car. The door openings themselves have extremely large radii, probably as a result of all-aluminum body construction. The amount of interior trim peeking out behind the frameless glazing is particularly noticeable on the front doors, which don’t benefit from a privacy tint. If this is Jaguar’s stiffest bodyshell ever, as they are claiming, why not do away with the B pillar and make it a two-door like the Rolls Royce Spectre, and have a fancy front seat tipping mechanism for access to the occasional rears?

That low roofline means the rear header rail is behind the passenger’s noggins, making a rear windshield an impossibility, so Jaguar have done a Polestar and not bothered, utilizing a rear-view camera instead. But the screen for this is centrally mounted on the cowl in the middle of the soundbar at the base of the windshield, where it appears to be partly obscured by the drivers display. Given the mildly interesting interior architecture with the central spine, I was hoping this would be used in an innovative way, but it’s just a fancy cupholder and storage console. The Allegro homage squared-off steering wheel does have haptic controls on the spokes and stalks, but everything else is via the touchscreen in front of the driver or the smaller one standing proud on that central spine. Again, this feels like a decision taken six years ago before we started pushing back against such nonsense.

I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t like the Type 01, or that I think this relaunch is a mistake. Jaguar had to do something different. I was playing around on the website this morning and selected black on black as my colorway. I immediately pictured myself pulling up outside Berghain on a rain-slicked Berlin night looking as sinister as all fuck, and it all sort of clicked. Slightly disappointingly though, all the other launch colors are variations of gnome laundry water. Jaguar has already pissed off the ruddy-faced traditionalists, so why not continue to give them the middle finger by offering the car in that Miami Pink? Really lean into the villain bit, which, lest we forget, is also a part of the Jaguar heritage.

I think this means we are seeing the beginnings of high-end car design moving beyond established norms of balance and good taste, toward something more targeted at particular cohorts of buyers. Some brands do this already; Lamborghini knows their customers are bored TikTok socialites and builds cars for them – and they sell every single one. The Luce isn’t meant for regular Ferrari customers; it’s for television housewives who can now say their new Ferrari was designed by the guy who did the iPhone. The Cybertruck might be a childish fever dream, but for its intended audience of techbros, it was exactly what they wanted. And this is where I think the Type 01 lands. To a certain type of customer who funds nebulous tech startups for a living and views regular people as an inconvenience on the way to the great tech utopia, the Type 01 is a perfectly brutal statement of hostility. Those sheer surfaces and extreme proportions will provoke onlookers, and once ensconced inside, the stripped-to-the-bone yet reassuringly digital interior will feel comforting and familiar.

We live in an age of flattened culture. The algorithm dictates aesthetics and taste. Coffee shops are all exposed bricks and string lights. You will drink a small-batch IPA. New consumer products invariably end up with rounded corners and come in various shades of griege. Human interactions have been replaced by apps with soft fonts and purple-to-orange gradient backgrounds. The flip side to this unthreatening bouba-slop norm is that it opens up space on the outside for hyper-targeted products aimed at very specific audiences. The splashy hyper-neon corporatism of Bungie’s Marathon is one of the most distinctive and original art styles seen in a computer game for decades, and like the Jaguar, it attracted eye-rolling amounts of outrage. But the people who love the game (myself included) really, really love it. By making the Type 01 exterior hostile to external audiences and the interior welcoming to LinkedIn AI thought leaders, Jaguar is undoubtedly counting on the buying power of Silicon Valley HNWIs to achieve the same result.

All images and top graphic image: Jaguar