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The cutting edge car du jour, even while very few will ever buy one, is a good index of what the world’s coming to. It’s a dress-for-the-job-you-want principle, on wheels: drive for the world you want to inhabit. That’s why when Tesla launched the Model X with a bioweapon defence mode (2016!), we should have been much more worried than we were, and it’s why the Jaguar Type 01 Grand Tourer EV has a lot to say.
“A new era”, the heritage carmaker calls it, and it’s not wrong: but having test driven the era (just with my eyes and imagination, rather than the car itself), I would like to return it to the showroom and choose pretty much any other era. Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s MD, speaks during the big reveal in New York. Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for JAGUAR Land Rover Its gigantic size alone makes it look as if it wants to wage war on the future.
The whole point of the electrification revolution in motoring was that we could wean ourselves off energy profligacy and on to elegant sufficiency. If you counteract all that with a car too wide (2m) and too long (5.2m) to fit into any UK car parking space, whatever advances you’ve made with aerodynamics cannot counteract the fact that you are hulking around something that looks more like a tank than a car; the atmospherics underscored by the glassless tailgate and 23-inch wheels. To unpack that a bit, you can’t see into the back at all, the preference for all the other glass is blackout, and the wheels on a Toyota Hilux, the Chad warlord’s vehicle of choice, are between 16 and 18 inches.
All the aluminium in the world ( 73% ) can’t put a dent in the 2.5-plus tonne weight, and they’ve bust their own balls to reduce the drag coefficient, only to arrive at one (0.23) easily bested by any average electric saloon (0.21). The look it’s going for, according to the literature, is “monolithic”, but it’s a thin line, isn’t it, between an immutable colossus and a menace, so attempts have clearly been made in the design to introduce a note of friendliness. Jaguar Type 01 interior.
Photograph: Jaguar Land Rover PR It comes in peace, the Jaguar 01 GT; you can tell by the rounded nose, and the body design creating the visual illusion of a front-to-back taper. If it were in a cartoon, it would be driven by the heroes not the villains, but they’d be heroes with no domestic life who knew how to handle themselves. They wouldn’t be The Incredibles.
Traditionally, the Jaguar was driven by a guy in his 50s, wanting to signal to the world that he could afford a car that cost roughly half his salary. That’s what the company is now trying to steer away from, preferring buyers who are “rich, urban, very design literate, very technology literate”, according to Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s MD. skip past newsletter promotion after newsletter promotion Some texture on that 50-year-old of yesteryear, whose type I knew well: my uncle had a Jaguar. Its paintwork was maroon, its interior a buttery leather, which meant we all knew he was earning a tidy packet, and we weren’t allowed to bring our dog for Christmas in case he scratched it.
That, in a nutshell, was the personality type, which – I posit – was bad enough. Jag Persona #0.1 is different: he doesn’t want your social admiration, he wants you to jump out of your skin and get your children indoors at his approach, which you’ll see before you hear and only fleetingly, as he races from 62mph to 112mph in 4 seconds. Florence Pugh attends the Jaguar Type 01 launch in New York.
Photograph: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic He wants you to know he has 150 grand in spare change (ticket price is £120,000 but the extras make that unlikely), and “urban” my aunt Fanny, there is no city situation in which this is a useful car. Regular city driving would be unbearable, given its width, and its standout features of power and agility (three engines, one at the front, one on each rear wheel) are best conceived for a getaway vehicle. Considering its gargantuan size, it doesn’t even have much space – only four seats and boot space that a Skoda Octavia would look at and laugh.
And yet on the plus side, it comes in “London red”, inspired by our mansion blocks and double-decker buses, our post boxes and room 32 of the National Gallery. These are all different reds, by the way, but then so are red trousers, yet their message is always the same: “I am the kind of person who would wear red trousers.” So if you see one, just think of that person, and make them worse, times a thousand.
Source: The Guardian
