It's clearly meant to try and give the impression of the E-Type from the side view, but done in a "modern" (aka slab-sided and needlessly bulky) manner. Which makes the whole "Copy Nothing" tagline ring even more hollow.
I don’t get how Jaguar is so bad at building cars people want to buy. A brand with that legacy, it should be easy!
Get back to the drawing table, design a new E-Type with slightly more modern design but with all the classic traits intact. Price it well below the 911.
Build a beefed up and cool XJ with retro styling and premium interior with lots of leather and wood.
Go HARD on the legacy thing, build cool cars that reminisce of the glory days and build the best interiors. Give them an attractive price compared to other luxury brands.
Unfortunately you can't pull the "legacy" card when nobody wants to buy your products in the first place, which is why Jaguar went for a total rebrand.
It's just sad Jaguar avoided the race track pretty much entirely in the past few decades, leaving it up to privateers to do all the racing for them. Motorsports does wonders for a car's popularity if you look at the new Corvette and Mustang.
The thing that sucks is, it's expensive to build up that image, and success isn't guaranteed. So they missed their opportunity by not putting in a consistent effort to take the F-Type or XK racing very much. Those cars were raced in GT3 and GT4, but not in sufficient numbers to attract any attention outside of niche regional motorsports fans.
Car companies these days are slowly becoming lifestyle brands as well, like Xiaomi which is a really good example. Consumers are seeing cars as appliances pretty much, an extension of their smart watch or phone. The weird agender sci fi marketing didn't help at all, but it was pretty clearly a step towards that. They definitely could have had a much stronger initial showing and this would have working out much better, though.
I'm just going to go with the press release today, as interpreting the Solar Crown stuff earlier broke my brain. Bentley Motors presents its latest luxury vision concept inside its brand-new design studio, which also officially opens its doors for the first time this week. EXP 15 represents...
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