By Professor David Bailey
7th October 2026
Reflections on the new Jaguar Type 01.
The new Jaguar Type 01 is not a car designed to please everyone. In fact, quite the opposite. It is deliberately controversial, deliberately extravagant and deliberately unlike almost anything else on the road. And that is precisely the point.
Jaguar has finally pulled the covers off the production version of the car that is supposed to transform the fortunes of one of Britain’s most famous automotive brands. The £130,000-plus, all-electric Type 01 is grand, dramatic and unapologetically luxurious. It is more than five metres long, over two metres wide, has a striking grand-tourer profile, 23-inch wheels and more than 1,000 horsepower (yes you read that right). Production starts in 2027 at Solihull, with electric drive units and batteries made at the i54 plant in Wolverhampton and body panels pressed at Halewood.
And if the question is whether Jaguar has made a safe choice, the answer is emphatically no. In fact, Jaguar is taking a very big gamble.
The reason is simple. Jaguar had to do something radical. For years the brand had become stuck in the ‘squeezed middle’ of the premium car market. It was supposed to compete with BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi, but struggled to do so. Yet the brand retained heritage and emotional appeal, but its products were not generating the sales momentum or market position needed to compete effectively with the German premium manufacturers and make money. Jaguar sales fell. And as I argued during the early stages of the rebrand, Jaguar simply could not carry on as it was.
But the problem was that there was no obvious way out. Jaguar couldn’t simply build another BMW 5 Series rival and hope for the best. It had tried that game, and it hadn’t worked. Nor could it simply become another luxury SUV brand because JLR already has Range Rover and Defender occupying highly successful territory.
Jaguar needed a new space.
So the Type 01 represents something much more radical than a new model. It represents an attempt to move Jaguar out of the traditional premium market altogether. That’s the really interesting thing about this car. Jaguar is effectively saying: forget BMW. Forget Mercedes. Forget Audi. We don’t want to fight them for customers anymore.
Instead, Jaguar wants to sit somewhere between the traditional luxury car market and a new, emerging world of ultra-expensive, highly individualistic electric grand tourers. The Type 01 is priced at more than twice the starting price of the outgoing F-Type and is aimed at affluent buyers who are prepared to spend serious money on something distinctive. Jaguar says it is targeting customers who are design- and technology-literate and who want their car to make a statement.
That makes the Type 01 both bold and commercially fascinating, because the uncomfortable truth is that the market Jaguar is targeting barely exists yet. The Type 01 will have to create a market.
There is a luxury EV market. There are expensive electric cars from Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, Lotus, Lucid and others. And there are electric models coming from the likes of Bentley and Ferrari. But there isn’t really an established market for a £130,000-plus, all-electric Jaguar grand tourer aimed at wealthy, younger, design-conscious buyers who want something more exclusive than a conventional German luxury car.
Jaguar therefore isn’t simply entering a market. It is trying to create one. And that’s both the genius and the danger of the strategy.
If Jaguar succeeds, it could become one of the most interesting automotive repositionings of recent years. Instead of trying to sell tens or hundreds of thousands of relatively expensive cars, Jaguar could sell considerably fewer cars at much higher margins. The brand aims to become smaller, more exclusive and more desirable.
That fits with JLR’s wider “House of Brands” strategy, in which Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar are being given increasingly distinct identities and customer propositions. Jaguar is now uniquely electric within that portfolio, while the other brands retain a mixture of powertrain options.
The Type 01 therefore isn’t simply a Jaguar with an electric motor. It is the physical manifestation of a completely different business model. And that explains some of the controversy.
Jaguar has effectively broken one of the cardinal rules of car marketing: don’t alienate your existing customers unless you have a very good reason. The Type 01 looks radically different from the Jaguars that came before it. The familiar visual cues have been stripped back. The traditional Jaguar leaper has been repositioned. There is no conventional rear window. The car is enormous. And the price places it in a completely different league from the Jaguar saloons and sports cars that many existing customers know and love.
The earlier Type 00 concept and the infamous rebranding campaign generated an extraordinary backlash. But perhaps that misses the point. Jaguar wasn’t actually trying to persuade the existing Jaguar customer that nothing had changed. It was trying to persuade somebody else to become a Jaguar customer. That is a much harder proposition.
The brand is effectively asking a wealthy customer who might previously have bought a Bentley, Porsche or Mercedes to look at a Jaguar and think: why would I buy that instead?
The answer can’t simply be electric power. Electric propulsion is rapidly becoming commonplace. Nor can it simply be performance. There are plenty of exceptionally fast EVs. Nor can it simply be Britishness, because that alone is not enough to justify a £130,000 price tag.
Jaguar has to sell difference. And that is what the Type 01 is designed to do.
It is almost a rolling piece of industrial design. Jaguar is betting that conspicuous individuality will become a selling point in an increasingly homogenised electric-car market. As electric vehicles become mechanically simpler, differentiation increasingly comes from software, design, brand, experience and exclusivity.
In that sense, Jaguar’s strategy is actually quite clever. It is saying that if it cannot beat BMW at being BMW, it should stop trying. But creating a market is considerably harder than entering one.
The risk is that Jaguar has moved so far away from its traditional customer that it has lost the emotional connection that made the brand valuable in the first place. There is also the question of whether wealthy consumers really want a giant electric Jaguar at this price. The luxury market is brutally competitive.
The Type 01 also arrives at a difficult time for electric vehicles. Demand has proved less predictable than many manufacturers expected, while Chinese manufacturers are becoming increasingly formidable competitors. JLR itself has responded by giving Range Rover, Defender and Discovery greater powertrain flexibility while keeping Jaguar fully electric.
So Jaguar is making a very unusual bet: that the future of the brand lies not in selling more cars, but in selling fewer cars to people prepared to pay much more for them. It is a high-risk strategy. But doing nothing would have been a risk too.
The old Jaguar was caught between heritage and a premium market increasingly dominated by BMW, Mercedes and Audi. It lacked the scale of the German giants, lacked the SUV dominance of its sister brands and lacked a clear proposition for the electric age.
The Type 01 is an attempt to blow that model apart. Whether it works will depend on whether Jaguar can persuade customers to buy into a market that has not really been created yet.
That makes the Type 01 more than a new car. It is an experiment in whether an established automotive brand can invent its own category rather than fight for somebody else’s.
It is bold. It is controversial. It is undoubtedly risky. But after years of Jaguar drifting in the premium wilderness, perhaps the biggest risk would have been to play safe.
Professor David Bailey works at the Birmingham Business School and is a Senior Fellow at the UK in a Changing Europe.
John Clancy and David Bailey
The new Jaguar Type 01 is not a car designed to please everyone. In fact, quite the opposite. It is deliberately controversial, deliberately extravagant and deliberately unlike almost anything else on the road. And that is precisely the point.
Jaguar has finally pulled the covers off the production version of the car that is supposed to transform the fortunes of one of Britain’s most famous automotive brands. The £130,000-plus, all-electric Type 01 is grand, dramatic and unapologetically luxurious. It is more than five metres long, over two metres wide, has a striking grand-tourer profile, 23-inch wheels and more than 1,000 horsepower (yes you read that right). Production starts in 2027 at Solihull, with electric drive units and batteries made at the i54 plant in Wolverhampton and body panels pressed at Halewood.
And if the question is whether Jaguar has made a safe choice, the answer is emphatically no. In fact, Jaguar is taking a very big gamble.
The reason is simple. Jaguar had to do something radical. For years the brand had become stuck in the ‘squeezed middle’ of the premium car market. It was supposed to compete with BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi, but struggled to do so. Yet the brand retained heritage and emotional appeal, but its products were not generating the sales momentum or market position needed to compete effectively with the German premium manufacturers and make money. Jaguar sales fell. And as I argued during the early stages of the rebrand, Jaguar simply could not carry on as it was.
But the problem was that there was no obvious way out. Jaguar couldn’t simply build another BMW 5 Series rival and hope for the best. It had tried that game, and it hadn’t worked. Nor could it simply become another luxury SUV brand because JLR already has Range Rover and Defender occupying highly successful territory.
Jaguar needed a new space.
So the Type 01 represents something much more radical than a new model. It represents an attempt to move Jaguar out of the traditional premium market altogether. That’s the really interesting thing about this car. Jaguar is effectively saying: forget BMW. Forget Mercedes. Forget Audi. We don’t want to fight them for customers anymore.
Instead, Jaguar wants to sit somewhere between the traditional luxury car market and a new, emerging world of ultra-expensive, highly individualistic electric grand tourers. The Type 01 is priced at more than twice the starting price of the outgoing F-Type and is aimed at affluent buyers who are prepared to spend serious money on something distinctive. Jaguar says it is targeting customers who are design- and technology-literate and who want their car to make a statement.
That makes the Type 01 both bold and commercially fascinating, because the uncomfortable truth is that the market Jaguar is targeting barely exists yet. The Type 01 will have to create a market.
There is a luxury EV market. There are expensive electric cars from Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, Lotus, Lucid and others. And there are electric models coming from the likes of Bentley and Ferrari. But there isn’t really an established market for a £130,000-plus, all-electric Jaguar grand tourer aimed at wealthy, younger, design-conscious buyers who want something more exclusive than a conventional German luxury car.
Jaguar therefore isn’t simply entering a market. It is trying to create one. And that’s both the genius and the danger of the strategy.
If Jaguar succeeds, it could become one of the most interesting automotive repositionings of recent years. Instead of trying to sell tens or hundreds of thousands of relatively expensive cars, Jaguar could sell considerably fewer cars at much higher margins. The brand aims to become smaller, more exclusive and more desirable.
That fits with JLR’s wider “House of Brands” strategy, in which Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar are being given increasingly distinct identities and customer propositions. Jaguar is now uniquely electric within that portfolio, while the other brands retain a mixture of powertrain options.
The Type 01 therefore isn’t simply a Jaguar with an electric motor. It is the physical manifestation of a completely different business model. And that explains some of the controversy.
Jaguar has effectively broken one of the cardinal rules of car marketing: don’t alienate your existing customers unless you have a very good reason. The Type 01 looks radically different from the Jaguars that came before it. The familiar visual cues have been stripped back. The traditional Jaguar leaper has been repositioned. There is no conventional rear window. The car is enormous. And the price places it in a completely different league from the Jaguar saloons and sports cars that many existing customers know and love.
The earlier Type 00 concept and the infamous rebranding campaign generated an extraordinary backlash. But perhaps that misses the point. Jaguar wasn’t actually trying to persuade the existing Jaguar customer that nothing had changed. It was trying to persuade somebody else to become a Jaguar customer. That is a much harder proposition.
The brand is effectively asking a wealthy customer who might previously have bought a Bentley, Porsche or Mercedes to look at a Jaguar and think: why would I buy that instead?
The answer can’t simply be electric power. Electric propulsion is rapidly becoming commonplace. Nor can it simply be performance. There are plenty of exceptionally fast EVs. Nor can it simply be Britishness, because that alone is not enough to justify a £130,000 price tag.
Jaguar has to sell difference. And that is what the Type 01 is designed to do.
It is almost a rolling piece of industrial design. Jaguar is betting that conspicuous individuality will become a selling point in an increasingly homogenised electric-car market. As electric vehicles become mechanically simpler, differentiation increasingly comes from software, design, brand, experience and exclusivity.
In that sense, Jaguar’s strategy is actually quite clever. It is saying that if it cannot beat BMW at being BMW, it should stop trying. But creating a market is considerably harder than entering one.
The risk is that Jaguar has moved so far away from its traditional customer that it has lost the emotional connection that made the brand valuable in the first place. There is also the question of whether wealthy consumers really want a giant electric Jaguar at this price. The luxury market is brutally competitive.
The Type 01 also arrives at a difficult time for electric vehicles. Demand has proved less predictable than many manufacturers expected, while Chinese manufacturers are becoming increasingly formidable competitors. JLR itself has responded by giving Range Rover, Defender and Discovery greater powertrain flexibility while keeping Jaguar fully electric.
So Jaguar is making a very unusual bet: that the future of the brand lies not in selling more cars, but in selling fewer cars to people prepared to pay much more for them. It is a high-risk strategy. But doing nothing would have been a risk too.
The old Jaguar was caught between heritage and a premium market increasingly dominated by BMW, Mercedes and Audi. It lacked the scale of the German giants, lacked the SUV dominance of its sister brands and lacked a clear proposition for the electric age.
The Type 01 is an attempt to blow that model apart. Whether it works will depend on whether Jaguar can persuade customers to buy into a market that has not really been created yet.
That makes the Type 01 more than a new car. It is an experiment in whether an established automotive brand can invent its own category rather than fight for somebody else’s.
It is bold. It is controversial. It is undoubtedly risky. But after years of Jaguar drifting in the premium wilderness, perhaps the biggest risk would have been to play safe.
Professor David Bailey works at the Birmingham Business School and is a Senior Fellow at the UK in a Changing Europe.
John Clancy and David Bailey