Jaguar's 1000hp electric GT | PH Meets

We've all seen Type 00 - now it's time to find out what things are like from the prototype's passenger seat...

The last time PH remembers looking out onto JLR’s paddock at Gaydon, enclosed on three sides by its offices, it was dusk and contained two of the very first examples of the current Defender, which were driven around in slow circles for the onlooking press like the scrubbed show ponies they were. The accompanying fanfare had been equally well choreographed; Land Rover knew the bit of its reputation that wasn’t Range Rover, the bit that was older and gnarlier and revered by grown men in wellies, was on the line. But it knew it probably had a hit, too. Covid travails aside, the modernised Defender fit 2019 like a glove.

Now, half a decade later and running late, it’s Jaguar’s turn on the House of Brands merry-go-round. Palpably, it is less sure. Not of whether the production version of its Type 00 concept will be a fundamentally ‘good’ car - objectively speaking, for reasons that we’ll come onto, it likely will be - but whether or not it is precisely the ‘right’ car to generate the adulation and must-have aura that it was designed to invoke. And while it is hardly fair for a single model to bear the full burden of a rebrand more than 90 years in the making, Jaguar only has itself to blame for that. Carmakers, as a rule, do not retire en masse into a poker-faced chrysalis, hoping to emerge as a very different butterfly a year later.

There is no version of its transition from volume manufacturer of rowdy combustion cars to luxury EV assembler that would’ve been to everyone’s liking - but while Jaguar was well-prepared for Type 00’s styling to divide opinions (indeed, it claims now to have heard plenty of dissenting views from day one), it was clearly not expecting the scale of mauling subsequently directed at its messaging or the long-running fallout that followed. Probably, though we still do not know for sure, it was not expecting to (allegedly, dramatically) part ways with one of the chief architects of both the concept and the message either. Or suffer the seismic aftershocks of a crippling cyber attack.

Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s affable Managing Director, recognises that things might have gone smoother. Much as he is prepared to acknowledge that the battery-powered four-door GT he is set to launch next year might have faced a more receptive market. The vaunted £120,000 to £140,000 bracket it will appear in is new to Jaguar, though the people shopping there are hardly themselves new to the concept of an upmarket electric car - the likes of the Mercedes EQS and BMW i7 have failed to find much success, much like high-cost EVs in virtually any segment. When Porsche, a brand that Jaguar would dearly love to emulate, feels duty-bound to veer away from an ambitious zero-emission strategy, you do start to wonder about the firm’s direction of travel as advertised.

But Glover is adamant: Jaguar’s future remains wholly electric. Granted, his declaration came before the EU’s decision to stage its own legislative U-turn on combustion, though in the short term that would hardly seem to matter. Moreover, despite the manifest choppiness of the water dead ahead, the MD is equally insistent about the underlying requirement for success: the firm’s old business model did not work, this one must. Meaning its new GT must go where no Jaguar has been before, with a controversial new look, no engine, no overt link to its past and be bought by people who are very likely strangers to the brand.

Perhaps understandably, quite how many willing buyers would constitute a success is, for now, still a mystery. Plainly, the days of Jaguar trying to mass produce its way to parity with more muscular German rivals are long gone, though similarly it cannot survive for long on very low volumes - not least because it isn’t charging Bentley Flying Spur money to join the club. Glover intimates, as Jaguar has done since it first presented Type 00, that it will be for whatever comes next on its new EV architecture to find customers en masse; it is the four-door GT’s job to shock and awe. First job, for better or for worse, and to a degree previously unwarranted, done.

The second job at least partly falls to Matt Becker and the wider Jaguar engineering team, and it is primarily to meet the Vehicle Engineering Director that PH is back at JLR’s paddock, blinking into the setting winter sun. Becker is good value on any given afternoon - as you might expect from a storied career that has already ticked off Lotus and Aston Martin - though one suspects that today his attendance was all but non-negotiable. Once upon a time, it was Mike Cross quietly assuring us that no matter the colour of the surrounding confetti, the new model in question had been rigorously developed underneath, with one eye solemnly fixed on what it actually meant to be a Jaguar. Becker’s job role might be different, yet his status as straight-talking guru on these occasions is much the same. Ditto his driving skills.

Later in the day, back indoors, we’re treated to a peek under the camouflage, though the waiting prototype is still heavily shrouded in the stuff. More often than not, the absence of a crisply defined outline causes a car to shrink - but there really is no getting away from the sheer size of the production model, nor its curious proportions. It is, as Jaguar keeps reminding us, longer than a Range Rover but lower than an F-Type. On 23-inch wheels, with that raked-back windscreen and shallow glasshouse, it ought to be as sleek as a buttered ferret, yet its front and rear, as bluff as chalk cliffs, defy the description. Presence, it does not lack in the flesh. Drama, even. But beauty remains conspicuous for its absence.

Becker makes no mention of the car’s appearance except to say that when he first saw the concept, he initially agonised about how it might be engineered to drive as a four-door GT ought to, particularly given the exaggerated distance between driver and front axle. Happily, fear of it turning like a giant Caterham 7 proved unfounded; indeed, the positioning of the front seats near the centre of the production model has apparently helped to shrink-wrap the driving experience. Which is a useful trait given the amount of real estate visible from the windscreen, that long, levelled-off prow as vividly present as a football pitch would be in your back garden.

The sight of it brings to mind the Rolls-Royce Ghost we tested just last week, though that car feels infinitely taller; not just in the location of the seats, but in ride height, too. Encouragingly, the Jaguar, even in unfinished prototype spec, its interior clad in the automotive equivalent of net curtains, immediately feels plush. Quiet you expect from an electric car, and no six-figure GT goes under-insulated - yet there’s sense as well, in the first 100ft, of the kind of imperturbable isolation that Rolls strives for in its rolling refinement.

High praise, of course, though it returns us to the question of character: what constitutes Jaguar DNA in the silent era? Becker acknowledges that the subject was up for debate early on, and required some extensive soul searching among the firm’s heritage collection. Intriguingly, he mentions the XJC V12 as one touchstone, though the overriding bullet points they ended up with ought to be familiar to most: comfort, composure, connectedness, confidence, with no single attribute delivered at the expense of another.

The technical means for arriving at this promised land reflect wider industry standards when it comes to building large EVs with substantial, 400-mile-capable battery packs. Jaguar has opted for a tri-motor, all-wheel-drive configuration, with a brace of larger motors located at the back and a single, smaller one up front. Becker says the car’s default torque split will mean around 70 per cent of the targeted 1,000hp output (probably a smidge more in reality) arriving at the rear axle, though of course the precise nature of the vectoring will depend on what you’re doing. While this is not the day for proving it, he cheerily acknowledges that the GT will go indulgently sideways, should you wish.

What the prototype does do on a cold, dry and runway-wide test track, is change direction with impressive, ground-hugging certitude. That the new model incorporates rear-wheel steering is no surprise, though interestingly Jaguar has not opted to include any variant of anti-roll system, Becker suggesting that the GT’s adaptive, dual-valve air suspension is more than up to the job at hand, and noting the inevitable weight penalty presented by an active solution - an important consideration in a luxury EV with a targeted kerbweight of less than 2,750kg.

Precisely where the production model ends up on the scales ought to be a source of enduring fascination to some, though, as ever, the final number will not ultimately handicap the car’s predictably momentous straight line performance. Becker has the prototype up to an indicated 160mph without conspicuous effort or delay, though he is adamant that Jaguar has worked to avoid neck-snapping, all-or-nothing throttle response; indeed, the GT is meant to evoke a ‘power in reserve’ feel, making it accessible and alluring when required, yet linear enough for its responses to seem instinctive.

This quality, one suspects, is the sort of thing Becker would like writ large. Discussing the importance of the steering to a modern Jaguar, he notes that the team have gone with a slightly quicker ratio, hoping to locate that engagement sweet spot where pushing on isn’t merely about going faster, but feeling the car come to you. Impossible from the passenger seat to know if they’ve succeeded, though there is sufficient assurance in the GT’s opulent ride quality at speed for you to start gamely hoping they have.

Becker graciously credits some of this dynamic polish to the impressively stiff platform they started with, as well as the uniform balance that comes from having a battery humming away beneath your feet. Not that you’ll actually hear it: one thing still left to do - or at least, not present and correct on our test mule - is to finalise the soundscape. Here Jaguar promises to build on the work it did with the I-Pace, not to mention install the kind of active noise cancellation that helps turn a 160mph squall into a gentle breeze.

That some customers might still prefer to hear the lusty rustle of a V8 amid the tranquillity is a point that Glover later concedes with a practised shrug. Jaguar has moved on; if it cannot convince those people of the validity of “the most powerful Jaguar we've ever produced… the fastest Jaguar ever produced… the quietest Jaguar ever produced” then so be it. The MD remains convinced, despite burgeoning real-world evidence to the contrary, that buyers don’t really care about the identity of their car’s power source, so long as you get everything else right.

The suspicion so far - and that’s all it ever amounts to from the passenger seat - is that many things about the production model will indeed be right. Possibly in ways that exceed all expectations. Nevertheless, the new four-door GT will look much as the concept does, which for some, is going to prove a stumbling block no less obstructive than the absence of an engine is to others. Jaguar, in wilful pursuit of the point of difference that has long alluded it, has become fixated on the remainder: well-heeled, brand literate and avowedly EV curious. Let’s hope they prove sufficiently numerous to kickstart the revolution its legacy deserves.

OP Posts Only

Prev 2 3...7 8 Next

OP Posts Only

Author

Discussion

Mushroom12

Original Poster

201 posts

111 months