Jaguar yesterday unveiled the Type 01, an all-electric four-door grand tourer priced from £130,000 in the UK, two years after a rebranding campaign that led to accusations the carmaker had gone “woke”.
The car is the first to emerge from the reinvention of the brand by parent company JLR, which wound down production of its old Jaguar models in 2024 and 2025. It is expected to be the first of three new electric designs from Jaguar. In the US, the price starts at $130,500.
The Type 01 has a long bonnet that deliberately harks back to Jaguar’s 1960s E-Type. Its electric motors produce about 1,000 horsepower and take it from 0-62mph in 3.2 seconds.
JLR says the car has a range of up to 320 miles at “sustained highway speed”. The company describes it as the “most technically advanced, powerful and aerodynamic Jaguar ever engineered”.
The unveiling met with mixed reactions on social media. Craig Kinnersley, who runs a luxury car consultancy, wrote on LinkedIn that the design was an “unmitigated catastrophe” that looked like a hearse and lacked any “memorable Jaguar flourish”.
“Looks like a Cybertruck and a Bentley Continental had an illegitimate child,” Facebook user Ken Katch said.
Car journalist Steve Fowler said the Type 01 looked “incredible” and made him “proud to be British”. “Not everyone will like it – that’s fine. Not everyone has to!” he wrote on X.
Alistair Weaver, from vehicle sales platform Edmunds, said Jaguar deserved some credit for the car’s looks, despite it being “polarising”.
“If Jaguar designed a car that looked like anything else, it would have had no hope,” Weaver told media. He added that the firm faces an uphill battle in the US, where electric vehicles are becoming less popular.
The launch follows the reaction to Jaguar’s change of direction in 2024, when it released an advert showing models in brightly coloured outfits and a new logo, but no cars.
Two weeks later Gerry McGovern, then Jaguar’s design chief, showed two concept cars in Miami, in Miami Pink and London Blue colour schemes. “Jaguar has no desire to be loved by everybody,” he said at the time. McGovern has since left the company.
Critics in the press and on social media claimed JLR was betraying Jaguar’s heritage in favour of going “woke”.
The reinvention of Jaguar as a luxury electric brand was part of a strategy JLR set out in 2023, in which it pledged to invest £15bn over five years in new models and technologies. In January, a Jaguar spokesperson said its plans to become an electric-only brand were unchanged, after a report that it was exploring a range-extender hybrid.
“Jaguar’s core demographic, despite the uproar, gave up on the brand years ago, so they effectively had nothing to lose,” said Matthias Schmidt of Schmidt Automotive Research.
Fowler said: “I think it really is a last throw of the dice. JLR has struggled to make serious money with Jaguar in the past, and that’s what it’s all about.”
Since the row, JLR has parted ways with the agency behind the rebranding campaign. The company also has a new chief executive, PB Balaji, and said last month that it was targeting about £1.7bn of savings over two years.
