• Jaguar unveils the much-anticipated Type 00 electric concept – pardon, design study.
The streets are alive with colours in Miami as Art Week sweeps through town and, for one of the most storied manufacturers in the history of the motor car, the setting is perfect to launch an aggressive re-brand and turn to building only battery-electric vehicles.
Most have seen Jaguar’s campaign on social media – and a more divisive ad campaign in cars we cannot recall – but only now are we seeing the actual fruits of all that labour.
High stakes, high controversy
The amount of kickback seen on various channels can mean a lot of things, but either way we know this: the Type 00 Design Study has a lot riding on it. This aggressive, modern re-branding of a very classic brand is a big leap, and if it’s going to be successful – if all the doubters are going to be silenced – then the Type 00 has to be good.
“Jaguar is at its very best when it’s a copy of nothing,” said Rawdon Glover, Managing Director at Jaguar. “But it is a real balance. If you lean too much on your past, it’s very difficult to be innovative and progressive. We have to leverage (our history), bit in a way that isn’t entirely retrospective.”
Design study, if you please
Why Design Study as opposed to Concept? Well, this is a look at what Jaguars are going to look like going forward. We can expect Jaguar’s first future EV to be less flamboyant than this, but the lines are drawn, so to speak.
Upmarket
The official line is that Jaguar is moving upmarket going forward, into a Bentley-esque price bracket. That can be seen readily in the Type 00. The “Rhodon Rose” colour fits well with the brand’s colourful re-brand, but that’s only the half of it.
The Type 00 is an exercise in near-perfect proportions for a grand touring sports car: long hood, fastback (big nod to the classic E-Type coupe there, not to mention the choice to add “Type” to the name, which is a classic Jaguar naming convention) and over-sized 23-inch wheels featuring one of the brand’s new logos. Recall there are two logos along with the leaping Jaguar emblem that Jaguar is calling “Maker’s Marks”. Plus there’s the wraparound brass strip that lowers everything to the ground.
Speaking of brass, you see it on the ingots just aft of the front wheels as well. Not only to these draw the eye, but they’re functional as well as they open up to reveal rear-facing cameras.
From the front, we see another new signature that Jaguar calls the “Strikethrough”. It may look like the Type 00 has a grille, but of course it doesn’t because there’s no engine there. That is part of the Strikethrough theme, which we will see repeated on the hood, the roof, around back and inside as well.
Speaking of the rear, it’s from the rear three-quarter angle that you can really see the fender flares and the Type 00’s squat stance. It’s an epic take on the grand touring formula.
Inside
Which brings us to the interior, which is every bit as transformative as the exterior.
Swing open the up-swinging doors – of course there are upswinging doors – and a ultra-modern interior is revealed. The “Strikethrough” theme appears on the dash, aft of the rear seats and on the hub of the oval-shaped steering wheel, and there are more brass accents.
We also find a new material not seen on the exterior, something called a “travertine stone” insert dividing the two seats.
At first blush, that’s all there is, but twin digital displays emerge with the press of a button. Those, of course, display the gauge cluster and infotainment and the way they deploy is slick.
Digital detox
Here's the thing, though: there’s a reason they aren’t ever-present. Jaguar thinks that we could all use what it calls a “digital detox”. So the focus was on presenting a clean interior without the distractions a screen can bring. Seems the nouveau riche buyers Jaguar is aiming at like their tech, but they like their zen as well.
In an effort to further blend those two mentalities, the Type 00 works with seemingly non-digital objects called “totems”. You may wonder why a seemingly inanimate 1 x 3-inch piece of either brass, travertine (there’s that name again) or alabaster belongs in a slick EV concept. But they’re aren’t entirely inanimate. When inserted in a special slot within the centre console, they bring up a certain ambiance in the car by tweaking the lighting, audio and so on.
We’ve seen drive modes in cars change those elements, but it’s never done in an analogue way like this. And, even once inserted, the process takes a few seconds. It’s not instant as it usually is, and it’s done this way so, according to Jaguar, occupants can relax and enjoy the experience. A digital detox, indeed.
