One of the industry’s most storied marques is taking a head-long plunge into electric vehicles—just as the market stagnates
You chose a fine time to leave me, Lucille!
Kenny Rogers’ lament to the tragedy of inopportune timing
Unfortunately — this is a story all about bad timing, after all — you can guess the rest. The C-X75, so far ahead of its time, was cancelled. According to Jaguar’s then-brand director, Adrian Hallmark, it was all because it was “the wrong time to launch an £800,000 to £1-million supercar.”
The reason for that seemingly-long winded tribute to a car most have never heard of — and even fewer got to drive — is because Jaguar is presently at the centre of another story about timing. This one, too, is being sung by the branding department, is also about electrification, and, just to prove that no one reads history any more (not even of the most recent variety), it is also about some really expensive cars Jaguar hopes to peddle.
More troubling — at least from a timing point of view — is that the company is launching this all-electric brand just as pretty much everyone else is retreating from battery power. Lithium-ion might have been all the rage when Jaguar’s brain trust hatched this plan five years ago, but the bloom is, at least temporarily, off that rose.
That’s not to say Jaguar is doomed to failure. Oh, you’d be absolutely right that, if the first of these mega-buck, battery-powered Jags were introduced, as I just said, right now, Jaguar’s re-brand would almost assuredly be an abject failure. Current market conditions suck, economies around the world are on a precipice, and, as I said, the luxury EV market is struggling.
But poor timing works both ways, and the fine print left out of pretty much all the discussions of Jaguar’s rebranding is that it isn’t selling these new electrics today. In fact, they probably won’t hit the market until at least late 2026. And, just as today’s pessimism doesn’t reflect the headlong rush into electrification that we’ve seen for the last three years, it doesn’t mean that today’s negativity will last forever. Indeed, if there’s a lesson that Jaguar should have learned from cancelling the C-X75, it’s that the auto industry, like the stock market, is almost impossible to time.
Author’s Note: There will be some, possibly many, who will disagree with my high praise of the C-X75. All opinions are, of course, encouraged. That said, fewer than 12 people outside of Jaguar, possibly even as few as five or six, drove the C-X75 PHEV back in the day. Of that small group, even fewer — perhaps even no others — were lucky enough, as I was, to drive all four of those Porsche, McLaren, Ferrari, and Jaguar first-gen electrified supercars on a race track. If you were one of those lucky few, I would dearly love to hear your remembrances. For the rest of you armchair engineers, kindly submit your comments to [email protected] to ensure your analysis is given the attention it deserves.
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