While Jaguar has announced that it will become a brand offering exclusively electric models in 2025, one wonders what will become of the brand’s sports cars.
Apparently, it is not yet decided, even for the CEO of the brand Thierry Bolloré. In the aftermath of the Jaguar Land Rover Group announcement that Jaguar will only sell single platform-based electric vehicles from 2025, questions have been raised about the future of the brand’s sports cars, especially the F-Type. Indeed, the British sports car is equipped with a turbo 4-cylinder engine of 300 hp or a compressed V8 of 450 hp, or even 575 in the R version. Engine blocks which no longer really correspond to the ambitions of the English firm.
By transforming Jaguar into an exclusively electric brand, the British manufacturer has already decided to kill the new generation XJ even if its development had progressed well. During a recent interview given to our colleagues at Top Gear, the boss of JLR, Thierry Bolloré, admitted that the company’s next generation of cars will be more compact than its current models and that the future of its sports cars remains to be determined. “This is a question that we are examining very carefully”, he said of Jaguar electric sports cars. “I’m not going to answer that now because it is an important question for us, and we will answer it when we have decided exactly what we want to do with the new Jaguar vehicle portfolio.”
Big changes to watch
All future JLR models will be based on one of the three available platforms, one of which will be used by Jaguar and two others that will support Land Rover models. While it remains to be seen which specific models Jaguar will produce after 2025, Bolloré has said he will encourage engineers and designers to think “Completely freely to prepare and offer the most evocative designs they can imagine”.
In addition to producing only 100% electric vehicles from 2025, Jaguar aims to achieve carbon neutral emissions in its supply chain, products and operations by 2039. Thus, no activity of the brand will emit CO2. A daring bet, but which can work and be much more coherent than the simple decision to stop the heat engines.
