30 October 2024 | General News
The article references JLR’s move earlier this year to drop the XE, XF, E-Pace and I-Pace, as well as the F-Type roadster. Jaguar managing director, Rawdon Glover, recently told Britain’s Autocar magazine that Jaguar “will no longer be on sale for new vehicles” in European markets by the end of 2024, with the UK set to follow early next year. American dealers, meanwhile, will be expected to sell from existing stocks of discontinued models well into 2025.
Kitman explains how Jaguar’s future rests on three new electric models, the first of which is expected to be unveiled in December, although we’ll have to wait a year or more for the production version to go on sale. He also quotes comments made to Car & Driver by JLR’s North America president and CEO, Joe Eberhardt, at this summer’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance: “We realized that while the current portfolio is beautiful… they lost a little bit of the special DNA that made Jaguar different from anything else that was out there. If you look back at the glory days, those were really unique vehicles. We need to get back to that DNA to find that mojo and build cars that are not necessarily for everyone but that are distinct, unique, and a copy of nothing.”
Kitman’s same Car & Driver column explains how Jaguar has been struggling in North America in recent years: “With five remaining Jaguar models delivering a combined 8284 US sales in 2023 – a near 80 per cent drop from 2017’s 39,594 and now representing a less than enviable 0.05 per cent market share – clearly something wasn’t working. By comparison, Mercedes sold 351,746 vehicles to Americans last year; BMW moved 362,244.”
Car & Driver cites Joe Eberhardt’s acknowledgement that success in the general premium market is tough to achieve: “In order to compete at the heart of that, you need to have scale. And that’s very difficult for an independent manufacturer like us. We don’t have the parts bin of Daimler or Toyota. So as a consequence, we have to focus on the part of the market that values heritage and brand pedigree and is willing to pay a premium.”
Jaguar’s future sales in the US will therefore fall even lower, as the company chases a higher price point and, so the plan goes, healthy profits. Joe Eberhardt says Jaguar has been reducing its US dealer network to accommodate the expected reduced volume, down from 200 outlets to around 120, the vast majority of them also selling Land Rovers. He told Car & Driver: “We don’t need to fulfil everyone’s needs and requirements. Because of the decision to be purely luxury [and all-electric], we gain the freedom for a design language that we wouldn’t have with a modular platform. We want to build a car that 30, 40 years from now is still here.”
