I do like watching all these parodies seeing how creative and imaginative people are.
Some stuff mentions the massive change that the automotive industry is facing, but don't have any answers other than to ignore it and wither away.
But if I put my business brain in and overlook a lot people whose arguments are sometimes based on Jaguar still being an independent British company. Whereas, in reality it's just a brand within Jaguar Land Rover, which is owned by a huge Indian conglomerate Tata.
From an investment point of view, the Jaguar bit hasn't really been stellar, OK but not great. Meanwhile, within the next room in the same corridor at JLR HQ, the Land Rover side of the business has been going great guns and has exponentially larger sales and profits.
So if you're Tata, do you need to bring some people in who know how to create a profitable business and get it back on track? Or do you have the people who can do this already?
Who are these Jaguar people? I can see on LinkedIn that Rowden Glover and Adrian Mardell aren't spring chickens, straight out of business school and Adrian Mardell the CEO had been with them for almost 35 years. I would think they pretty much live and breathe Jaguar.
I think pretty much everyone accepts thing needs to change. As mainstream cars in the £40-£70k market are going to be coming from China, India, Malaysia etc. But is radical and what seems like betting the house the right thing to do? Going back to the investment angle and Tata's money, how much of last spin of the roulette wheel is this? Who knows exactly what the car market will look like in 10 years time?
Back to the people again. Land Rover (and Range Rover). was a business with a target market largely based around 4X4s for farmers and the British army. But these same people created the Chelsea tractor and transformed it into an icon of a luxury car brand and noone saw that coming;
Whilst it seems Gerry McGovern (chief of design) isn't very cuddly ,as the motoring media are always having a dig (e.g. Chris Harris has a dig about the capital G in the latest video). If Tata was going to bet on a horse, McGovern has won races for them against the odds in the past. Most recently being the Land Rover defender, which was something the motoring media said was an icon and messing about with it was sacrilege, doomed to failure etc! So much so, that the Ineos Grenadier was created to exploit the demise of the defender and mop up. Ooh er missus! Well that didn't quite go as the media bookies were expecting! Land Rover horse wins by a couple of lengths, by the looks of it and the motoring media have to admit they were wrong.
I think the new jr badge that looks like two walking sticks is crap. Yes this strategy looks like a huge gamble, but I'm not sure about the statements that there's no target market for this. After all, these are the people that made a target market out of footballers and their wives etc buying farmers 4x4s! Playing devil's advocate here, but not beyond possible maybe.
JLR aren't going completely EV, just the Jaguar bit. The V8s are still going into the Range Rovers. Lotus might go back to ICE for a bit, but they are part of Geely, which has the EV angle covered off in spades (horses for courses, you might say).
There's a whole section on Jaguars website, committing to continuing support for previous customers and models, so I maybe don't need to sell my car, as most of the bits are running around in Range Rover SVRs anyway it shouldn't be a problem for some time anyway.
As already said a couple of posts back, if it creates the profits to enable survival allowing future sports cars like the CX75 to be made, they can make as many Barbie pink saloons as necessary.