LET'S RUN OR IT'S SURE TO CHASE US DOWN [547]

The Toyota Corolla is the biggest selling car in history, but I had to remind myself of this because, in its twelve generations over the last sixty years the car is, if not boring, then ubiquitous enough to blend into the urban background. I can reliably see three of them within five minutes of leaving the house one early Sunday morning, namely the one which I posted this article, one of which was a taxi. If a police car had passed me, that would likely be a Corolla too. “The car in front is a Toyota” was the company’s advertising tagline in the 1990s, but is more often true now.

I have noticed the wedge shape of the Corolla estate more recently as it has become more seen in the UK as a police car and taxi. The “Police Authority Specification Corolla”, only available as an estate, appeared in 2024 with a 1.8 or 2-litre hybrid petrol engine, and fully kitted out for police use by Toyota themselves, rather than by the police constabulary themselves or an intermediary, which I though had been the case to now.

Special rates are also offered for the Corolla estate, in a “Sports Icon” trim level, through Toyota’s fleet and business portal, which appears to be the source of the prevalent Corolla taxi. I have twice been in the back of these, at either end of trips to and from an airport, and they are perfectly serviceable as a taxi for hire, with enough rear room for four suitcases, although I do not agree that it can sit three people in the back. A “Corolla Commercial” is also sold on Toyota’s website, the back seats of the estate removed to install a flat floor, the remaining rear doors and windows not stopping them from describing it as a van.

The Toyota Corolla appears to be the only estate car still made in Britain, at Toyota’s UK manufacturing plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire, with engines made in another Toyota factory in North Wales. All Corolla 5-door hatchbacks and estates sold in Europe are made in the UK, and while a slightly smaller Japan-only version of the estate is made and sold there, it is based on the European design. From 2020 to 2025, the estate was branded as a Suzuki Swace, under a five-year licensing deal Suzuki made with Toyota that seems only to have changed the badging, as it was one of my airport taxis – I guess it filled a need for Suzuki at the time.

Estate cars – or station wagons, if you must – are not endangered as a category of car, the sport utility vehicle (SUV) proving the versatility of their form. But the shift towards SUVs by car companies has reduced the availability of “regular” cars that used to form fleets of company cars, taxis and police cars. The Ford Focus and Mondeo have ended production in Europe, the Volkswagen Golf is only sold as a hatchback, but the Vauxhall/Opel Astra continues to hold on, their prices are undercut by other manufacturers, including VW’s own Skoda and Seat, and by Toyota.

I could have easily written this article about Skoda, although their use as a service car is split: the Octavia, similar in size to the Corolla, is also often used as a taxi in the UK, the result of good word of mouth and competitive deals, but the next car up in size, the wonderfully named Skoda Superb, is more often used by the police on motorway patrols, most likely replacing the Volvo V90, another discontinued estate car. Both cars make good use of parent company Volkswagen’s parts bin and service network, which also readies their models for police use, but my guess is that, as the inventors of “just-in-time” manufacturing that saves on storage expenses through having parts ready only at the right moment, Toyota is passing on value in other ways.

I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD [476]

Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising. Far be it from me to defend the decisions of a multi-national car manufacturer, but belittling creativity is something I will not have.

On Tuesday 19^th November, Jaguar Cars unveiled a thirty-second advertisement featuring a group of colourfully-dressed individuals arrive on an equally colourful, but rocky landscape. They look around, then look at you. One paints lines with a paintbrush, and another brandishes a sledgehammer. Two-word slogans fill the screen: “create exuberant”, “live livid”, “delete ordinary”, “break moulds” and, most importantly, “copy nothing”.

With no cars featured, this was instead a statement of intent by Jaguar ahead of the announcement of a new electric-only car range on Monday 2nd December. Regardlessly, it was met with knee-jerk derision by commentators and social media accounts, using the ad as a vehicle for their existing prejudices by accusing Jaguar of junking their heritage to embrace diversity and “wokeness”, as if they were trying to make more of a point beyond the slogans in the ad, rendering anything not presented straightforwardly as being suspect. 

This invective felt like the inverse of the jokes I made in an article I wrote back in 2017, about the then-new Range Rover Velar helping people to identify and come out as Range Rover drivers: “I should be more open-minded and respectful about the life choices people make, and learn more about what leads to people wanting to drive a Range Rover. The more we know, the more the world can be a better place - so long as we don’t cut each other up.”

I was also unimpressed with the derision of Jaguar’s new image as having appeared from nowhere, as if years of preparation hadn’t been made in formulating Jaguar’s new approach – they are moving upmarket from making “executive” cars that competed with BMW and Audi, becoming a high-end brand alongside the likes of Bentley and Porsche – along with stopping production lines to retool their factories for the new range of cars, also the culmination of years of development.

Predictably, the aesthetic of the ad prompted people to ask if Jaguar had started making clothes, as if licensing deals between car and clothing manufacturers had ever existed, and others that included a direct competitor to Jaguar, Tesla’s Elon Musk, said “Don’t you sell cars?”, a reference to none being shown in the ad, to which Jaguar’s managing director Rawdon Glover said, “Yes. We’d love to show you”.

I had thought that people would have looked at the ad more closely, or looked more than once – it was only thirty seconds long. In two scenes, areas are painted over or illuminated with lines, a reference to the “strikethrough” imagery that forms both the new use of the Jaguar “prowler” logo – the main Jaguar logo is now just a sans-serif wordmark – and a design motif that will feature on the new range.

Despite the startling difference with Jaguar’s former establishment image – the Jaguar JX6 saloon was the British Prime Ministerial state car from 1979 to 2019, when Boris Johnson replaced it with a Range Rover – the ad was hardly the blindside to convention it has been made out to be. Those that remember a startling series of UK ads from 1995 that said only beautiful people drink Martini, depicting someone getting plastic surgery to comply,  will be aware of the disruptive tactics used by advertising agency Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury (HHCL), including the extraordinary Tango soft drink ads of the 1990s, and the launch of First Direct Bank in 1988 that “hijacked” ITV and Channel 4 simultaneously with a broadcast purportedly from the future. Jaguar needed people to start talking about Jaguar again before they could start talking about their cars, and couldn’t have achieved that aim more perfectly.

The slogan “copy nothing” comes from Jaguar’s founder, Sir William Lyons, who once said that “a Jaguar should be a copy of nothing”. He had a point. Walking down one street in my home town, not necessarily the most affluent but just above average, there were three Jaguars from the current model range, all of which have been withdrawn this year: an XE saloon, an XF saloon, and an F-Type coupé. Only the Jaguar badge and grille distinguished them outwardly from the other cars in the street, all of which have the same raked, aerodynamic lines and pull-out door handles. Even worse, I passed an X-Type estate car, made during the period of Jaguar’s ownership by Ford, and based on the mass-market Ford Mondeo – you get the feeling the car should not have been allowed to happen.

When the notorious car conglomerate British Leyland was formed in 1968, merging the firm that owned Jaguar with the parent company of Rover, both names were used on cars that drove heads of state, not “executives”. This was rationalised to make Rover the more “affordable” brand, and perhaps the cars Jaguar had wound up making could, if it still existed, have been branded as Rovers – Jaguar’s current parent company, Jaguar Land Rover, have owned the Rover brand since 2008, but have seen no reason to use it so far.

Speaking of Land Rover, and any comparisons of the Jaguar ad to a clothes or perfume manufacturer are also a little ironic when you consider how the Range Rover, which has turned over time from a utility vehicle to a luxury SUV, once named its must luxurious trim level “Vogue”, after the magazine. This shift, alongside the shift in car buyers’ tastes towards sports utility vehicles, has directly benefitted Range Rover, perhaps at the expense of Jaguar, whose own SUVs were built on the same platforms as the Range Rover Evoque and Velar. In the current car climate, Range Rover effectively ate Jaguar’s lunch, hence the need to reposition themselves.

The new Jaguar cars – an XJ6-like saloon, a grand tourer coupé, and a further SUV – will reportedly start from £100,000, which is the same as a large Range Rover, but a bit more than a Porsche. I don’t know why they didn’t just go with “POA” – “price on application” – because if you have to ask how much a luxury item costs, you can’t afford it anyway. That is the realm where Jaguar is destined or, for those that admire creativity without being able to drive, where it remains.