Jaguar’s First All-Electric Concept Is a Polarizing Break From the Marque’s Past

In the viral video which announced Jaguar‘s complete reset last month, and which set social media ablaze, the marque promised to “copy nothing.” It has now revealed the first car of this new era at Art Miami, and it seems to have made good on that pledge.

After years of declining sales, Jaguar might have been forgiven for thinking that nobody cared about it, and that it could go bold with the rebrand. Seems not. Its decision to ditch both 90 years of heritage and its existing, aging customer base in favor of clean-sheet design and a younger, more diverse demographic drew attention and consternation on a scale it could not have predicted. In fact, everyone from Elon Musk to right-wing British politician Nigel Farage seems to be weighing in.

If they hated the rebrand, they’re unlikely to like the car. The Type 00 is electric, as all future Jaguars will be. It looks utterly unlike any Jaguar that went before it, but it also repudiates the new EV design orthodoxy which prioritizes aerodynamic performance and uses the packaging advantages of electric drivetrains to produce spacious, cab-forward interiors.

Instead, Constantino Segui Gilabert, Jaguar’s chief exterior designer, has produced a grand touring coupe with a nose like a cliff face and a long, flat hood that looks like it ought to house a twelve-cylinder combustion engine. The sharply raked windshield starts well back in the car’s wheelbase, the roofline stays low, and the cockpit ends with a glassless fastback rear hatch. Although the combination of a long hood and a rear-set cabin might seem to echo Jaguar’s seminal E-Type, the straight-cut surfacing of the Type 00 gives it a completely different character. The delicate, pretty E-Type is almost tubular in section, like an aircraft fuselage, whereas this car is massive and monolithic.

The Type 00 name (Jaguar would like you to say “zero-zero”) references zero tailpipe emissions and the brand’s complete reset: this is “car zero” for the new Jaguar. It won’t be sold, but is being touted as a “design vision concept,” previewing the three new production Jaguars to come. The first, a four-door grand tourer will be revealed in a year’s time and will go on sale in the summer of 2026. Jaguar has released images of a disguised prototype of that car being road-tested, and it clearly shares the dramatic front end and overall proportions of the Type 00. Two SUVs, designed alongside the concept car and the four-door, will follow.

Many of the Type 00’s details will also be hiding under that disguise. The bold, 16-line “strikethrough” graphic, which conceals the rear lamps, will become a key Jaguar identifier: it’s echoed elsewhere on the exterior and in the cabin of the concept car, and it will appear across the production cars as well. Brass is used as an accent material on the exterior, and the artfully simplistic cabin uses both brass and fine, lightweight veneers of travertine stone: both might also make it to production.

Jaguar has revealed little about what lies beneath the Type 00’s extraordinary styling, save that the Jaguar Electric Architecture which underpins it was engineered to enable the design, and not the other way round, as is more common. Despite that bluff front end, the first production car will have an electric range of 430 miles (EPA), but there’s no guidance on the battery capacity required to produce that, nor on power or performance. We do know that prices will be significantly higher than those of Jaguar’s previous model line. Instead of an average purchase price of around $70,000, expect an entry point of at least $130,000. The old models have largely been phased out already, except for the F-Pace SUV, which will continue to be made until early 2026.

No luxury carmaker has ever divorced itself from its past as comprehensively as Jaguar has. With the reveal of the first car under this new identity, it’s clear that only the name, the “leaper” graphic, and the “copy nothing” slogan—which came from founder Sir William Lyons—are carried over.

Perhaps, though, one more thing remains. The Jaguar Land Rover group’s CEO, Adrian Mardell, told us that he wanted the launch of the Type 00 to create the same “sensation” as the debut of the E-Type at the Geneva Motor Show in 1961. It’s certainly done that, if not for quite the same reasons.

Click here for more photos of the Jaguar Type 00 all-electric concept car.

Credit: robbreport.com