"Jaguar Land Rover will create 1,300 new jobs in the UK to build its first ever sports utility vehicle (SUV) model.

The jobs will be based at its Solihull plant in the West Midlands."

I'm happy for the 1,300 people promised new jobs.

However, the car itself is totally indistinguishable from scores of other small SUV vehicles already available to buyers. A severe case of monkey see, monkey do.

In my humble opinion, this will only serve to downgrade the Jaguar image, and thus cause an overall loss of sales for this prestigious mark, thereby reducing overall employment associated with this brand.

Too bad they couldn't come up with something noteworthy.

 

Well John, I have to very politely disagree with you on this one.

Jaguar has to follow the money, and doing this hasn't done Porsche any harm because they sell an SUV, (the Cayenne), as do all the other German marques, plus Lexus. The SUV market is huge and getting huger. Any car maker that ignores this trend will soon be in trouble. Sir William Lyons was always considered to plough his own furrow but he always had his eye on the styles of other manufacturers and what the market was buying.

Jaguar currently is a very small scale manufacturer, and needs to cover the market to get itself up to the size of at least Porsche, but will have BMW or Audi in its sights too.

Of course the Jaguar SUV is totally different from the Land Rover products although there will be commonality of a lot of parts.

Me, I would never buy an SUV, I like elegant cars even though the green croakers want us all to keep to 40 mph. I might have a look at a used XE in a few years. Can't afford a new one !!