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.

GET INTO MY BIG BLACK CAR [401]

I have now been to New York City twice, but one major detail I don’t remember seeing in 2011 became a fixation in 2023: the slow-moving traffic being punctuated by grossly oversized sports utility vehicles, always coloured black, with blacked-out windows, criss-crossing the city’s grid.

The only kind of vehicle as prevalent as these cars were the taxis, the old Checker cabs and Ford Crown Victorias long replaced by the Ford Escape (sold as the Kuga in the UK), the Nissan NV200 van and the Toyota RAV4 SUV – the Nissan took us from JFK airport, and the Toyota brought us back. But, of course, they were taxis, brightly coloured with uniform decals making them clearly visible as vehicles for hire. 

The black SUVs, other than their number plates, were unmarked, their purpose unclear. The tinted windows in the back of my parents’ car makes me feel like a low-level diplomat when I’m sat inside, but there can’t be that many of them in New York – the United Nations headquarters was at the end of the 42nd Street hotel in which we were staying, but I saw none of them stopping there.

The only clue to these cars’ identities was at the end of our trip, when we asked the hotel concierge to book a taxi, and we were asked if we wanted a taxi or SUV. Of course, we said we wanted a taxi, but that finally made the embarrassingly late connection for me.

I am now aware about the numerous private companies providing “black car service” for airport transfers and around the city, replacing purpose-built limousines, and particularly stretch limousines, with more discrete SUVs that have the same design as each other. They are all around 220 inches long (5.6 metres), weigh nearly three tons, have bonnets/hoods that come up to my shoulder and, most importantly, have three rows of seats, carrying up to nine people, making them sound more like a bus.

I now also know that the gargantuan Cadillac Escalade, the black car flashing the most chrome, was introduced in answer to the Lincoln Navigator, but just as the Lincoln is a warmed-up Ford Expedition, the Cadillac is a more luxurious Chevrolet Suburban or GMC Yukon and, fitting the evolution of the American SUV, they are all longer-wheelbase versions of other cars and pick-up trucks made by Ford and General Motors. The only reason I didn’t see a Chrysler badge on any of these cars is because their competing brand is Jeep, and I never saw a black one of those.

The original Chevrolet “Carryall Suburban” went on sale in 1934 as a station wagon built on a truck body, while the luxury 4x4 vehicle originates with the low-stance, car-like Jeep Wagoneer of 1962. Separately, the Range Rover was introduced in 1969 as a more liveable version of Land Rover’s utilitarian vehicles, still having an interior that could be hosed down if required, and later officially arriving in the United States through more highly appointed “Vogue”, after the magazine, and “Autograph” trim levels. Now, they all occupy the same luxury space, the current Range Rover now over three feet longer than its original model, but far less visible in New York than the American brands of truck.

Now I know what they are, did I miss out on taking a ride in one of these black SUVs? No – it would have felt like being driven around in my hotel room.

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER [274]

The Ineos Grenadier is an off-road car to be released in 2022, following a six-year process where Sir Jim Ratcliffe pushed his chemicals company, most well-known as a sponsor of cycling and sailing teams, into car production to fulfil Ratcliffe’s dream of building a modern, rugged vehicle in the spirit of the original Land Rover of 1948...

...or, when Jaguar Land Rover declined to sell Ratcliffe the tooling and moulding for the previous model Land Rover Defender, which ended production in 2016, he decided to build a vehicle that looks so much like the original Defender that, if it drove past you, you could mistake it for one. Some edges have been smoothed off, and the front and rear lights are different, but apart from that, the Grenadier – named after the pub in which Ratcliffe and his team conceived the idea – appears to be for people that wanted the old Land Rover Defender, but didn’t want to buy second-hand.

In a September 2020 article for “Autocar” magazine [https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/ineos-grenadier-2021], reporting on the 17,000 pre-orders received so far, designer Toby Ecuyer, usually known for his work on superyachts, appeared relaxed about the Grenadier’s resemblance to the Defender: “It has been fascinating, benchmarking all the cars we have. One thing I’ve learned is how little there is between cars. I mean, you only have to change a vehicle a little to make it look like something different. Shift the headlights a bit and you’ve suddenly made a Ford Bronco.” Fortunately, the rest of the interview suggests more passion than this one answer suggests.

(It should be noted that, in August 2020, Jaguar Land Rover lost in the litigation it brought against Ineos, when a judge upheld a decision by the Intellectual Property Office decided that the Defender’s design wasn’t distinctive enough to be trademarked, highlighting previous models of the Jeep Wrangler and Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen as examples of similar-looking designs [https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/jaguar-land-rovers-trademark-court-case-testimonies-revealed].)

Looking on the Ineos Grenadier website [www.ineosgrenadier.com], it is made clear the purpose of the car defines the design: “We’re building on the legacy of classic 4x4s. A box-section ladder frame. Permanent four-wheel drive. Beam axles. And a boxy body that’s designed rather than styled.” The car is “a working tool. More angles than curves. Function dictates form, every time. It exists because Ratcliffe “identified a gap in the market for a stripped back, no-nonsense, utilitarian 4x4.”

Surely Land Rover filled this gap over seventy years ago? The only reason Sir Jim Ratcliffe could have perceived a gap was Jaguar Land Rover’s ending of the Defender’s production, but this was more a case of their hand being forced in January 2016 rather than choice. Safety and emissions regulations precluded the Defender from being sold in various parts of the world, and had been withdrawn from sale in North America back in 1997 when the car’s design, already heavily modified for the market, was unable to accommodate side airbags. The new 2020 model Defender, using a more standard aluminium unibody structure and air suspension as standard, was designed to meet safety standards worldwide, and if it results in a car perceived as more upmarket than its predecessor, that appears to have been the result of remaining vital and competitive.

Declining to allow Ratcliffe to buy the original Defender’s tooling does not mean that Land Rovers have previously been built, under license, by other companies. Much like the notorious Lada Riva was a Russian evolution of the original Fiat 124, and the Seat Alhambra was a modified Fiat Panda produced after Seat’s license to build the original expired, the Spanish manufacturer Santana moved from being a builder of Land Rover-supplied “complete knock-down kits” to making their own legally-distinguishable version when their license ended in 1983 – the final version of it was also sold in Italy by Fiat, as the Iveco Massif, before they merged with Chrysler and started importing Jeep vehicles instead. (Fiat appears to be the centre of derived car designs – add in variations made in Bulgaria, Egypt, Turkey, India and South Korea, and the Fiat 124 lays a claim to being the most popular car in the world.)

With pre-orders and a court case resolved, all Ineos have to do now is start building the Grenadier. Originally seen as being a leader of British manufacturing following Brexit, with a new factory to be built in Bridgend, there was disappointment when Ineos decided to instead buy the Daimler-Benz plant at Hambach, France, to be vacated when production of Smart car series moved to China. To be fair to them, they had not promised that the Grenadier would be built in the UK – the underlying ladder frame is being built in Austria, and the engines are being supplied by BMW. Then again, the new Land Rover Defender isn’t being made in the UK either: with the original space at the Jaguar Land Rover factory in Solihull filled by production of other sports utility vehicles, namely the Jaguar X-Pace and Range Rover Velar, the Defender is being made at a facility in Mitra, Slovakia, alongside the Land Rover Discovery.

I CALL HER DOUBLE R, MY ROUGH RIDER [44]

More than any other car is the “Range Rover” a badge of identity. Range Rover owners have chosen to make a statement about yourself, literally sitting them intimidatingly above the rest of the traffic, and in luxury putting them further above even the vans and buses. They never worry about the cost of fuel, and may never go off-road either. they want people to know they have a Range Rover, so it is already written on the front for you.  They own a Range Rover because they can afford one.

If this sounds like you, I can only offer my congratulations. You may have always identified as a Range Rover driver before you could own one, or it could be something you have only recently recognised about yourself. Once you have accepted yourself, the rest of your life is ahead of you, and all you need to do is drive.

Land Rover are doing their best to encourage Range Rover drivers to come out. Once the original Range Rover, launched in 1970, made driving a 4x4 vehicle as a regular car an acceptable option, the identity of the brand flourished, replacing vinyl seats with leather, moving from three doors to five, and introducing air conditioning. No longer would it be acceptable to shower the interior out with a hose, so by the first redesign of the Range Rover’s body was unveiled in 1994, we had arrived at the archetypal Rolls Royce on tractor tyres, or “land-yacht.”

However, one of the Range Rover’s original engineers, Spen King, said it was, “never intended as a status symbol but later incarnations of my design seem to be intended for that purpose.” It has been parodied by BMW, Porsche, Audi, Volvo, Jaguar, and even Bentley.

The expanded Range Rover range is incomparable, because comparisons create disappointment: drivers of the Range Rover Sport are driving something that hopes to fool people into thinking it is “The Range Rover,” looking and sounding as much like “The Range Rover” as possible, despite being a bit smaller, and a bit cheaper. The “entry-level” Evoque exists to create an “entry-level”, and the new Velar, unveiled last Wednesday (1^st March), exists to compete with fancy cars like the Porsche Macan, the sort of land-yacht you find in Kensington and Chelsea.

To be honest, I really should not be judging this. My view of Range Rover drivers, and their cars, has come from prejudice, and that is only because I don’t know enough about the subject. I am not someone that will become a Range Rover driver, and I have never felt like I am supressing a part of personality. 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.