Want to buy a Jaguar? Because suddenly, I don’t want to own one. My F-Type, once my pride and joy, is now an embarrassment to me.
And apparently, I’m an equal embarrassment to the manufacturer. They’re desperate to disown me and anyone who looks like me – middle-class, male, white, and ‘heteronormative’.
Preparing for the launch of its new range on December 2, Jaguar has provoked outrage and ridicule with the release of a 30-second advert featuring eight androgynous and miserable-looking catwalk models in ludicrous clothes. And not a car in sight.
The commercial opens with a yellow pod on a pink Martian landscape. As the doors slide open, with a pulsing mechanical sound, the robotic mannequins step out. One has a collar like a lampshade and her puffy skirt round her knees. Beside her is a woman with a rectangular chunk chopped out of her Afro and pom-poms for ankles.
Both women happen to be black. At their shoulder is an Asian man all in yellow with a velour doughnut around his middle. ‘Create exuberant,’ urges the caption. ‘Live vivid.’
A man with a greying bob spins round like a clockwork dancer on a musical box, trailing paint from a brush in his hand.
‘Delete ordinary,’ declares the next caption. Then an albino woman produces a yellow sledgehammer: ‘Break moulds,’ we are exhorted, though she doesn’t break anything. ‘Copy nothing.’
It’s a ludicrous spectacle and, if the word ‘Jaguar’ didn’t appear for three seconds at the end, you might assume it was intended to sell perfume, or possibly hallucinogenic mushroom soup.
It’s an extraordinary departure from the image Jaguar has built up as a ‘British icon’ over many decades.
The brand isn’t British, of course, and hasn’t been since it was sold to Tata Motors, part of the Indian steel conglomerate of the same name in 2008. But until now it has been proud of its 80-year automotive pedigree.
Even the tagline ‘Copy nothing’ is a tacit nod to the firm’s founder, Sir William Lyons, who said, ‘A Jaguar should be a copy of nothing.’
We Jag drivers have long revelled in the brand’s macho, hedonistic and luxurious reputation. Ten years ago, their promotions department came up with the ‘Good to be bad’ theme, featuring actor Tom Hiddleston at the wheel, revving the engine and reciting Shakespeare.
It showed off the cars to such wicked effect that the Advertising Standards Authority promptly banned the campaign. It encouraged buyers, said the ASA, to drive in a way that was ‘irresponsible and illegal’.
There’s no danger of that now. The characters in the current ad look as though they’d only travel by electric scooter or UFO.
On social media, the reaction has been scathing. ‘How to destroy your brand in 30 seconds,’ one commenter wrote under the ad on YouTube. ‘This is not a rebrand, this is Jaguar’s farewell to the world,’ said another.
But the marketing department appears not so much defiant as arrogant and utterly unself-aware. What the actual hell is this?’ demanded one user on X.
‘The future,’ responded Jaguar’s social media team, managing to sound both pompous and sanctimonious in two words. That future includes ditching the traditional logo with its snarling ‘big cat’ and the all-capitals lettering, replacing it with a weedy typeface that reads ‘JaGUar’.
When one person asked, ‘Umm where are the cars in this ad? Is this for fashion?’ Jaguar replied, ‘Think of this as a declaration of intent.’
‘Go woke, go broke,’ warned a tweeter. ‘Go hard,’ retorted the manufacturer. Billionaire owner of Tesla and X, Elon Musk, joked: ‘Do you sell cars?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Jaguar smugly. ‘We’d love to show you. Join us for a cuppa in Miami on December 2?’
That’s a reference to the forthcoming product launch in Florida – rumoured to be an electric four-door saloon costing £100,000. Perhaps the most ominous of the responses came when someone questioned whether this was the real Jaguar online account. ‘Soon you’ll see things our way,’ they replied, sounding more like the East German secret police than a British car-maker.
Jaguar’s middle-aged managing director Rawdon Glover is as unrepentant as his teenage social media team. He expects the majority of current Jaguar customers to abandon the brand, and that 85 per cent of future sales will be to first-time customers.
It’s obvious that he and his executives are ashamed of the people who buy his cars … people like me. We’re seen as overwhelmingly white, Brexity and past the first flush of youth. We’re no longer welcome and neither is our money.
Apparently, he’s unaware of the catastrophic consequences suffered by US beer brand Budweiser, which tried to give its Bud Light brand a woke makeover by hiring transgender ‘TikTok influencer’ Dylan Mulvaney to revamp its image. So many people switched to drinking other lagers in protest that Bud Light forfeited its dominance as America’s bestseller.
Just last week, Boots tried a similar trick with their Christmas advert, starring Adjoa Andoh, the actress who described the King’s Coronation as ‘terribly white’, in the role of Mrs Claus – and using gender-neutral pronouns.
Unsurprisingly, it sparked a backlash online. Boots clearly didn’t get the memo that people want to be entertained and charmed by Christmas adverts – not lectured or sneered at.
But increasingly, businesses appear happy to jettison their entire customer base in favour of such woke virtue-signalling, even if it hits them in the pocket. Activists first. Loyal customers second.
Not that Jag owners, who – for some reason – might be tempted to go electric after this catastrophic rebrand, will be able to get one any time soon. The next generation EVs are not expected to go on sale until 2026, so customers will go elsewhere.
Meanwhile, in a double insult to loyal British Jag-drivers, overseas buyers will still be able to order the F-Pace which went out of production in the UK earlier this month.
It’s also increasingly clear that EVs are not the eco-friendly marvels we’ve been led to believe. Their battery manufacture involves mining for rare metals, often causing serious environmental harm.
And while their electric engines create negligible carbon emissions, much of the power they consume is itself generated with fossil fuels. Critics claim their tyres disintegrate more quickly, due to their greater weight, which causes pollution. And Britain’s potholed roads are already unfit for use in many places.
All Jaguar’s insistence that EVs are ‘the future’ ignores the obvious fact that the UK lacks the infrastructure to support the electric cars we already have, never mind millions more.
The recharging points don’t exist. Most people don’t have private driveways for overnight charging. And our National Grid isn’t ready for a massive increase in demand.
I don’t believe electric vehicles are the future. Neither does the general public, judging by the falling sales of EVs. Other manufacturers from Ford to Porsche report that the market is shrinking, and are cutting back on electric production.
Even if I did decide to purchase one, it wouldn’t be from a salesman in shoulder-length PVC gloves and shaved eyebrows, dressed in 50ft of shimmering gauze. It would be a Tesla from the enemy of woke, Elon Musk.
