Jaguar Scraps Planned Electric XJ, Yet Vows to Go EV
Only by 2025. CEO won't promise that Jaguar will offer anything
that could be described as a sports car beyond 2025. Land
Rover, too, will go electric by 2035.

Jaguar Land Rover has joined the rush of auto
makers committing to an electric future, one that
will see the first Land Rover EV arrive as soon as
2024, and the British SUV brand is committing to
offering a pure electric version of every model in the
range as soon as 2030.

The transformation for Jaguar is going to be con-
siderably more radical. The brand’s entire range of
combustion models is set to be axed as soon as 2025.
From that point onward, Jaguar will become a solely
electric brand, with models set to be built on what
the company says is a new platform that won't be
shared with Land Rover. The company has also con-
firmed there is no place for the forthcoming XJ se-
dan under this Reimagine strategy. The XJ has been
scrapped despite being almost ready for market in-
troduction—and despite being an EV. When ques-
tioned about the new strategy, JLR CEO Thierry

Bolloré refused to promise that Jaguar will offer an-
ything that could be described as a sports car beyond
2025. For a brand long associated with performance
sedans, coupes, and roadsters, that marks a revolu-
tionary change.

The official line on the XJ's cancellation was
limited to a terse announcement that the car "does
not fit with our vision for the reimagined brand."

But Car and Driver managed to speak to a well-
informed insider who says that the XJ's biggest prob-
lem was that "they [the company] didn't think they'd
be able to sell enough of them" and that its combina-
tion of performance, range, and likely price point

"just wasn't attractive when compared to the wider
market." The XJ also seems to have fallen afoul of
JLR's attempts to rationalize its production base: the
Castle Bromwich plant that was to build it, is set to
be repurposed away from construction once the XE,
XF, and F-type currently assembled there are phased
out.

Bolloré refused to say how many models Jaguar
will offer beyond 2025 but conceded that "the port-
folio is going to be more compact." That is no sur-
prise given the brand’s sliding sales. After a peak of
180,000 units following the launch of the F-Pace and
E-Pace crossovers, these had slumped to just
102,000 globally last year. That figure was driven
downward by the COVID-19 crisis but also split
among six different models. That's barely more than
the 93,000 across two model lines that Saab man-
aged in the year before GM dumped it in 2010.

Bol-loré promised that the brand’s future will involve
cars that "totally reimagine Jaguar and are absolutely
unique." Yet, given current market trends, we'd be very
surprised if that didn’t result in a lineup formed exclu-
sively of crossover EVs.