Bollore, in answering a reporter’s question, said Jaguar would be moving away from SUVs. That has dealers wondering about Jaguar’s 2025 EV lineup. Since sedans, wagons and sports cars aren’t selling and Jaguar won’t have SUVs and crossovers, what’s left?
Jaguar Land Rover’s North American boss, Joe Eberhardt, last week held a conference call with dealers who are wondering — and worrying — about Jaguar’s future.
The battery-powered Jaguar I-Pace crossover has been a hit-or-miss vehicle. It does OK in regions such as California and Florida and a few East Coast cities but has virtually no demand at other many other stores.
The dealers received no specific details about Jaguar’s 2025 lineup.
Two Jaguar dealers who spoke with Automotive News on condition of anonymity came away with different interpretations of Bollore’s presentation. One believes the plan signals the end of the road for Jaguar — whose U.S. sales in pandemic-stricken 2020 were about a third of their peak of 61,204 in 2002 — while the other thinks the new direction will succeed.
Says JLR spokesman Stuart Schorr: “By the middle of the decade, Jaguar will have undergone a renaissance to emerge as a pure-electric luxury brand with a dramatically beautiful new portfolio of emotionally engaging designs and pioneering next-generation technologies.
“For Jaguar, we will now continue to work, including with our retailers, to fully prepare for that next generation of the brand, while we also go to market with the current new Jaguar lineup to 2025.”
Farrar Vaughan, president of Jaguar Land Rover Bluff City in Memphis, Tenn., is cautiously optimistic. “I think with Gerry McGovern being in charge of the Jaguar brand, it’s a really good thing, and we’ll see something really outside the box, something really dramatic. That’s what I hope.”
