Jaguar boss: I don’t care if Nigel Farage hates our car rebrand

If you believe the old marketing adage that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, Rawdon Glover should be the happiest man in business. More than 100 million keyboard warriors have posted, read, liked or shared social media messages about the brand he runs, Jaguar cars. They include Elon Musk, America’s most powerful motormouth, and Reform UK MP Nigel Farage.
The snag is, most of the comments lack the grace of the great Jaguar sports cars and saloons of the past. “I predict Jaguar will now go bust. And you know what? They deserve to,” said Farage.
Critics’ tyres are smoking at Jaguar’s radical rebrand, unveiled on Tuesday. Out goes the aggressive leaping cat on the bonnet of its new cars and also the predator’s face on the roundel badge. In its place is a soft, golden double J logo. Teaser images of Jaguar’s sharp-edged, all-electric, £100,000 new concept car, which will be unveiled at Miami Art Week on December 2, have been dismissed as looking like Musk’s brutal Mad Max-style Tesla Cybertruck.
Did Glover, managing director of Jaguar, part of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), expect the backlash? He didn’t “expect to be the number one and three trending topics on X on either side of the Atlantic”. But he welcomes it. “We wanted to start a debate — to get people thinking and talking about Jaguar in a different way.”
Glover, who is sporting a cornflower blue shirt in his Midlands office in anticipation of his trip to Miami next week, sounds pleased that Farage, the personification of the dated gin’n’Jag set, does not like the new brand. “People love us for our history and our heritage, but that has not led to huge commercial success. The average age of the Jaguar client is quite old and getting older. We’ve got to access a completely different audience. That audience isn’t centred around people of the demographic of Mr Farage.”
“Not a huge commercial success” is putting it mildly. While sales of snazzy Land Rover and Range Rover models have soared in recent years, Jaguar’s attempt to compete with the German luxury car giants has been an epic failure. It has sold only 60,000 cars annually in recent years. That’s a rounding error for BMW and Mercedes-Benz, which each sell more than two million cars a year. It’s time for “dramatic change”, says Glover.
Dramatic is one way of describing what he is trying to pull off. Bonkers is another. Ahead of its relaunch as an electric-only brand in 2026, Jaguar has stopped selling all its models in Britain, including the popular F-Pace SUV, F-Type sports car and the pure electric I-Pace, which was voted the best car in the world when it was launched six years ago. It is pinning all its hopes on a new four-door grand tourer, which is likely to be followed by an all-new saloon car and an SUV — although Jaguar sources say they have not ruled out a sports car. All will be designed and built in Britain.
JLR plans to build a combined total of 50,000 of the new Jaguars a year in its Solihull factory. That’s a tiny fraction of its former sales target, but with each priced at more than £100,000, the company thinks it can make money. Glover points out that “there are 2.5 million luxury car buyers in the world”. Jaguar only needs a tiny fraction of those to decide they must have the new Jaguars — or they will die! — to thrive.
Given the mountain that Jaguar has to climb, the first of the three new models has inevitably been dubbed Jaguar’s “last-chance saloon”. Glover understands the joke but believes he will have the last laugh because the cars, designed by Gerry McGovern, Britain’s most fêted car designer, will be modern icons, just like the E-Type, the MKII and the XJS, and will save the marque.
“We’re our very best when we copy nothing. Look — we’re unveiling the brand at an art fair, rather than a motor show. This is Jaguar being bold, doing things differently.” He added that all the new cars “will drive like a Jaguar”.
Billions of pounds of investment in the new Jaguars is guaranteed, Glover said, thanks to the whopping profits that Land Rover and Range Rover make. JLR, owned by India’s Tata Motors, netted a record £29 billion in revenue in the last financial year, up 27 per cent on the previous year, and pre-tax profits rose to £2.6 billion, the highest since 2015. Adrian Mardell, JLR’s chief executive, has pledged to invest £15 billion across the group over the next four years.
Fine. But isn’t Glover’s timing off? Sales of electric vehicles, especially luxury ones such as the Porsche Taycan, have cratered as customers turn back to petrol cars, worried by many EVs’ limited driving range, a spotty charging network and plunging residual values. Some luxury EVs lose half their value in their first year of ownership.
Glover pointed out that the new Jaguars will have a 430-mile range on a full charge, and that it will take only 15 minutes to juice the battery enough to guarantee 200 miles. “Most EVs are nowhere near those statistics,” he said.
By the time the first new Jaguars are delivered to customers in late 2026, demand will have “evolved”, he predicted, adding that the timeline for sales of the three new models “runs into the next decade. Between now and 2030, we expect to see a quadrupling of the charging infrastructure”.
Many critics say Jaguar’s new logo and the decision to dump the leaping cat that has been its trademark since 1945 shows it has been defanged and gone woke. Glover insisted that the new brand and associated advertising campaign “is not about diversity and inclusivity”, but rather “breaking moulds, living vividly, and creating objects of desire that are distinctive and different”. He pointed out that the leaping cat logo has survived — albeit on the side of the car.
He is angry that some Jaguar executives have been singled out for blame for the “woke” rebrand. “Public personal attacks on individuals are not acceptable. I don’t want that.”
Jaguar’s new in-house social media team has followed the lead set by pugnacious Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, and is engaging with its critics. When Musk noticed that the brand launch did not show the full car and tweeted “Do you sell cars?”, Jaguar replied: “Yes. We’d love to show you. Join us for a cuppa in Miami?”
Glover knows that the new audience he wants to attract is more likely to come across Jaguar on X, Instagram and TikTok than by reading a car magazine. Ninety per cent of those who have come across the new Jaguar online “are new to our brand.”
All now turns on what those keyboard warriors write when they finally see the complete concept car at Jungle Plaza in Miami’s Design District next week. Few people outside Jaguar’s inner circle have seen the two-door that will morph into the four-door production model. But those who have report that far from being defanged it is big, bold and very aggressive – and nothing like the Cybertruck. Michael Quinn, the eldest grandson of Sir Williams Lyons, the founder of Jaguar, has seen the car and said last night: “I’m dumbstruck – in a good way.”
Glover hopes that Elon, if not Nigel, will feel the same way.
Radical new models such as Jaguar’s new electric car can transform a brand. The fun, fast Peugeot 205, below, made the staid French car maker sexy almost overnight when launched in 1983. Christopher Lambert drove the 205 GTi through Paris in the opening scene of the hit 1985 film Subway.
Porsche became the first luxury car maker to challenge the mighty Range Rover with its Cayenne 4×4, unveiled in 2002. Critics said the maker of the iconic 911 sports car had lost its soul. Customers disagreed and now Porsche is a wildly profitable SUV maker with a sports car division attached.
Volkswagen’s failure to replace the Beetle left it on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s. It was saved by 1974’s hatchback Golf. It became VW’s best-selling model and David Bailey’s TV ad of Paula Hamilton discarding her lover’s gifts, but keeping the keys to the Golf, was a classic.
Few people had heard the word “hybrid” before Toyota launched its petrol-electric Prius in 1997. It made Toyota the choice for green consumers for almost two decades.