Jaguar's Two-Year Rebrand Bet

Why Jaguar Emptied Its Own Showroom

Jaguar is owned by JLR, which is owned by India's Tata group. Inside JLR, Jaguar had become the small brand. From April to June 2024 it made up about 15,300 of JLR's 111,200 retail sales, roughly one car in seven. Range Rover and Defender did most of the selling.

Jaguar's managing director, Rawdon Glover, later told Top Gear that the brand had been fighting in the "volume premium space," a market the German brands mostly run. "Jaguar didn't work commercially," he said. JLR's answer, announced in February 2021, was to make Jaguar "an all-electric luxury brand from 2025."

In late 2024 Jaguar made three calls at once. It stopped selling its old cars before the new one was ready. It aimed far higher on price: Glover put the old average UK sale at about £55,000 and the new target at about £120,000. And it launched the new brand first, with the car to follow.

On November 19, 2024, Jaguar switched on the new brand: a new wordmark, a redrawn leaping cat, the line "Copy Nothing," and a 30-second film with no car in it. Thirteen days later, at Miami Art Week, it showed a concept car called the Type 00, in pink and in blue.

Why it was risky: Jaguar would go about two years with nothing new to sell, while its dealers still had costs to cover. The buyers it was leaving behind were the ones most likely to complain in public. And because the brand arrived long before the product, one ad with no car in it had to carry the story.

Jaguar's Sales After the Rebrand, in Numbers

People watched. The ad passed 160 million views, by one count, and Elon Musk replied with four words: "Do you sell cars?" Plenty of viewers disliked it. Glover said he was disappointed by the abuse aimed at the people in the film, and he stood by the campaign.

Then the sales fell, as the plan meant they would.

• 160M+Views of the relaunch ad, by one count · Malay Mail; Campaign Asia
• ~40%Negative share of online talk about Jaguar after the relaunch, up from 21% before (an estimate by media-analysis firm CARMA) · Campaign Asia; Marketing-Interactive
• 49New Jaguars registered across Europe in April 2025, down from 1,961 a year earlier (−97.5%) · ACEA
• 6New Jaguars registered in the UK in January 2026, against 783 a year earlier · SMMT via Autocar Professional
• £14mJLR's profit before tax and exceptional items in the year to March 2026, down from £2.5bn, while revenue fell 20.9% to £22.9bn · JLR

Those registration numbers spread online as proof the rebrand had failed. Mostly they show a company that had already stopped selling its old cars, on purpose.

On December 19, 2025, the last combustion-engine Jaguar, a black F-Pace SVR, came off the line at Solihull and went straight into the heritage collection. After that, Jaguar had no car in production.

JLR had a rough year at the same time. A cyberattack in September 2025 stopped its UK factories for about five weeks, US tariffs hit, and sales in China slowed. JLR names the Jaguar wind-down as one of four causes of the profit drop, but it doesn't say how much each one cost, so we won't guess. The shipments do show who carried the company.

The leadership changed too. P.B. Balaji, Tata Motors' group finance chief, took over as JLR's chief executive in November 2025 when the previous CEO retired. Gerry McGovern, the design chief who led Jaguar's reinvention, announced in March 2026 that he was leaving to start his own consultancy.

On October 6, 2026, in New York, Jaguar showed the Type 01, a four-door electric GT. It starts at £130,000 in the UK. Jaguar told CNBC the US price starts at $130,000 (Reuters reported $130,500). JLR claims up to 1,030PS, 0 to 62 mph in 3.2 seconds and an estimated range of up to 400 miles. It will be built in Solihull, and orders open in early 2027. That date moved along the way: the 2021 plan said all-electric from 2025, and in late 2024 the new car was due on sale in 2026.

Jaguar says more than 50,000 people have registered interest and that about four in five have never owned a Jaguar. Registering interest costs nothing, and nobody has paid for a car yet. The press coverage of the car has been mostly neutral.

CARMA found that most of the neutral coverage was about specs and price, and that most of the negative share still traces back to the rebrand. One of its analysts called it "a remarkable half-year for a brand with nothing on sale."

Read the numbers with care. The ~800 figure is provisional and rounded by JLR. The US price and the 50,000 sign-ups come from Jaguar. CARMA's 2024 numbers measure online conversation and its 2026 numbers measure press coverage, so they don't line up as a trend. JLR doesn't publish profit by brand.