Someone has to say it: Jaguar is gone.
The much-hyped “Copy Nothing” rebrand—complete with an “exuberant modernism” campaign—has drawn fierce ridicule, even as the company claims it is going to field something like its concept called Type 00. This pastel pink-and-blue fastback “commands attention, like all the best Jaguars of the past,” Jaguar claims. In reality, it looks to many observers like an awkward oddity: a low-slung EV with butterfly doors, a glassless tailgate, Miami-bright colors, and no trace of the brand’s snarling-cat crests. The whole rebrand has purged Jaguar’s identity—discarding the leaping-jaguar “leaper” logo and round crest in favor of a minimalist wordmark and neon-accented pop-art ads. Online, the reaction was swift and merciless. The logo was mocked as un-Jaguarish. The ads were panned for showing models in Prada amid 1970s furniture but no cars. Even the concept’s tribute—laser-etching a miniature leaper onto pop-up brass panels—felt timid, not reverent.
While the brand chased cultural reinvention, the metal disappeared. Jaguar’s lineup has now effectively vanished. By 2024, the XE, XF, and F-Type were gone. The I-Pace and E-Pace were discontinued later that year. Only the F-Pace remains—and even that is marking time. In practical terms, Jaguar has stopped selling new vehicles globally for a full two years while it winds down operations in advance of a hoped-for 2026 electric relaunch. There are no new models. There are no confirmed production plans. And there are no cars in the pipeline that buyers can touch, drive, or order.
The numbers tell the story. Jaguar’s global production plunged to just 59,300 units in 2024—its worst year in decades. That figure is down from over 180,000 just six years earlier. As of 2025, Jaguar made up only 15.5 percent of Jaguar Land Rover’s retail volume—about 66,866 vehicles—down from nearly 48 percent in 2018.
Meanwhile, the Range Rover and Defender brands now make up over 70 percent of all JLR sales. Jaguar is no longer a business unit, it is a vanishing line item. A remnant. And with no confirmed product arriving until at the absolute earliest late 2026, there is no credible case to be made that Jaguar is still an automaker in any functional sense of the term.
It wasn’t always like this. Jaguar was once the standard for design. The 1961 E-Type—“the most beautiful car ever made,” Enzo Ferrari famously said—established a design language so inherently correct that even MoMA praised its proportions. Sir William Lyons’s Jaguars were equal parts elegance and performance.
From XK120s to XJ12s, they were deeply British, undeniably sexy, and spiritually untouchable. When Jaguar launched its own V12, it wasn’t just an engineering achievement—it was a gauntlet. That move spurred German rivals to follow suit. It helped push BMW to create the M70 and Mercedes-Benz to resurrect twelve-cylinder power for the W140 S-Class. The 21st-century V12 boom—from the 760Li to the Maybach 62—owes a quiet debt to Coventry’s willingness to build perfection out of symmetry and displacement.
The wider strategy is equally bleak. In 2021, Jaguar boldly announced it would become an all-electric brand by 2025. Four years later, it has built no follow-up to the I-Pace. A promised XJ EV was quietly canceled. No new nameplates have emerged. The plan now is to relaunch as a hyper-niche, ultra-luxury electric brand—“Aston Martin lite,” as some have called it—with low-volume, high-cost offerings positioned somewhere north of Tesla and closer to Lucid. But this is a market with no margin for error—and Jaguar enters it with no product, no customer base, and no recent success. Add to that the logistical realities: Jaguar has idled or shut down key plants like Castle Bromwich, outsourced future assembly to Magna, and poured its remaining capital into restructuring. There is no factory momentum. No viable architecture. Just slide decks and speculation.
That legacy has collapsed into farce. The I-Pace, launched in 2018 as Jaguar’s electric rebirth, is now best known for its catastrophic resale values and its use by Google Maps and by Waymo for self-driving taxis. Analysts have repeatedly ranked it the highest-depreciating mass-produced car in modern history. Intended as the spearhead of a new era, it has instead become a cautionary tale—proof that brand equity can’t survive slow charging, poor range, and brand drift. The car is a ghost. Its production ended in 2024. Its market impact never began.
Land Rover, by contrast, is ascendant. Its product line is clear, profitable, and precisely aligned with what luxury buyers want. In FY2023/24, the Range Rover family sold more than 203,000 units—up 20.6 percent year-over-year—while the revived Defender line broke 114,646 units, up 53 percent. Combined, Land Rover models now account for roughly 85 percent of JLR’s total volume. Quarterly earnings calls celebrate Defender’s “record margins.” Dealers can’t keep Range Rovers in stock. The brand’s identity—British luxury for Range Rover, rugged capability for Defender—is not in question. It simply works.
The divergence could not be sharper. Jaguar, once the soul of JLR, is now a ghost brand without inventory, without market share, and without a strategy that anyone believes. Land Rover, by contrast, is the reason JLR exists at all. In recent quarters, the company has openly prioritized “the most profitable Land Rover and Range Rover products” while discontinuing Jaguar models entirely. As of 2025, the name “Jaguar Land Rover” is functionally dishonest. It is Land Rover, full stop.
And yet—mourning lingers. What Jaguar once represented, the midnight sprint up the M1, an XK engine breathing through triple carbs, a bonnet that stretched from the clutch to the horizon, is gone. Mourn the lineage that inspired not just emotion but imitation—that made German engineers go bigger, quieter, smoother, in a decades-long attempt to match the grace of a Coventry grand tourer.
That momentum ends here. In 2025, Jaguar is producing no cars. Selling no new vehicles. Announcing no concrete plans. It is a paused brand, at best—and an abandoned one, more likely. Land Rover continues onward—cash-rich, sales-driven, and globally admired. Jaguar, meanwhile, survives only in memory and museum curation. It has vanished first from the bonnet, then from the showroom, and now from the road.
Beauty, perhaps, was never meant to last. But one hoped it would at least outlive a marketing quarter.
Jaguar is dead. Long live Land Rover.