I’ve waited until after the reveal of Jaguar’s Type 01 to comment, partly because I wanted to see the production car and partly because I have some history with the programme. Full disclosure: I worked agency-side on elements of Jaguar’s reinvention, including discussions around HMI, brand and product strategy. Without betraying confidences, I can say that some of the decisions which now provoke an incredulous ‘what were they thinking?’ were the subject of considerable research, debate and occasionally rather difficult compromises.
Which brings me to Harry Metcalfe, whose recent review of the Type 01 is a fascinating watch, and in places a rather good illustration of the limitations of traditional automotive journalism when confronted with something as deliberately unconventional as the new Jaguar.
I like Harry. I’ve followed him since his evo days and there’s probably nobody on automotive YouTube I’d trust more to explain why a Countach is impossible to reverse, why a suspension setup feels wrong, or whether a car will be intolerable after three hours on the M40. He has an extraordinary instinct for the physical experience of machinery. In UX terms, he’s a remarkably accomplished human-factors observer, albeit one with rather more interesting test equipment than the rest of us.
His encounter with Type 01’s rear doors is a case in point. Here’s a car more than five metres long, yet getting into the back appears to require the flexibility of a teenage gymnast. The combination of that low roofline, substantial B-pillar and surprisingly small aperture produces an almost comical result. Harry wonders why Jaguar didn’t simply fit rear-hinged doors and give the thing a bit more theatre. It’s a perfectly reasonable question but I doubt one the engineers didn’t already consider at length.
He is equally unimpressed by the reliance on touchscreens for basic controls, and I’m largely with him. Having spent years working on automotive and in UX, I’ve never subscribed to the idea that hiding a function behind two or three interactions somehow makes the experience more sophisticated. If operating the wipers requires instruction to the degree it was demonstrated here, something has probably gone wrong.
But where I begin to part company with Harry is in his assessment of what Jaguar is actually trying to create.
The two-door Type 00 concept, unveiled in Miami in 2024, was an uncompromising declaration of intent. Type 01 is the production four-door GT, with over 1,000PS and a starting price of £130,000. Its extraordinary proportions, curious material choices and almost wilful rejection of established Jaguar conventions are manifestations of a much larger decision about where the brand believes it should compete. Harry recognises much of this. In fact, his discussion of personalisation, the limited colour palette and Jaguar’s radically reduced retail network shows a considerable understanding of luxury positioning. His argument that a car at this price should offer more bespoke opportunities is a good one.
But I wonder whether he’s applying an assumption about luxury that isn’t necessarily universal.
I’ve written before about the extraordinary cultural differences in what people consider desirable. An Emirati collector might regard a two-tone Phantom with intricate marquetry as the height of craftsmanship and generosity. A Copenhagen architect might find the same thing grotesque. An Italian collector might be obsessed with the precise finish of a machined component, while an American buyer wants their car to be noticed from the other side of Beverly Hills. None of them is necessarily wrong. And the luxury brands that succeed understand which of those people they’re designing for.
So when Harry questions the rather prominent brass-inspired ingots, or asks why Jaguar offers so few colours, I think there’s a broader question worth considering. Must expensive cars always offer unlimited personalisation? Is the Rolls-Royce approach necessarily the correct model, or can a brand establish value through the confidence of its own choices, even when those choices are divisive?
Ferrari has traditionally been rather good at the latter, at least in controlling the fundamental character of its products. Rolls-Royce, conversely, has made individual commissioning central to the proposition. Both are legitimate approaches, serving overlapping but different expectations. There’s a considerable difference between inviting a customer to express their, sometimes vulgar, taste and allowing them to dismantle the identity of the thing they’re buying.
The same applies to Harry’s suggestion that Type 01 might have been a greater commercial success with a hybrid powertrain. He may well be right about the potential sales, particularly given how the electric vehicle market has evolved since the programme began. But Jaguar’s ambition, clearly stated time and time again by Rawdon and others, is to establish an entirely different position in the luxury market, at substantially lower volumes and higher prices than before. Selling more cars is only useful if they’re the right cars, sold to the right customers, at the right margin.
Which is where the appraisal of a car begins to diverge from the diagnosis of a business. There is no shortage of automotive expertise involved in Type 01, nor any apparent shortage of deliberate design intent. But what is fundamental to this is to answer whether Jaguar has correctly understood the people it now wants to attract, what those people value, and which compromises they’re willing to accept. Those are questions that sit well upstream of the screens on the dashboard, the powertrain or the size of a door opening.
Harry himself acknowledges this towards the end of his review when he wonders whether he’s actually the intended customer. After the ingress and egress demonstration, I think that’s probably his most second most perceptive observation of the entire half-hour.
None of the above lets Jaguar off the hook. An expensive car can be distinctive and still badly compromised. You cannot defend poor ergonomics simply by invoking luxury or declaring something to be a design statement, I have to wonder if that’s ultimately what led to Gerry’s departure. Equally, personalisation and scarcity only have value when people genuinely want what you’re offering.
I suspect Type 01’s rear doors will annoy almost everyone who tries them. What we don’t yet know is whether they’ll annoy the people Jaguar needs to buy the car.
