Two Years After the Ad With No Cars

On October 6, Jaguar drove the Type 01, the first car of its all-electric era, through closed New York streets, two years after a rebrand film that never showed a vehicle.

Jaguar staged the premiere of the Type 01 across the city rather than inside one room. Large digital displays in Times Square, DUMBO and the Lower East Side marked the night of Tuesday, October 6, and the car itself arrived by road, driven through closed streets on the West Side by António Félix da Costa of Jaguar TCS Racing, the brand’s Formula Eteam. The drive ended in West Chelsea, at an invitation-only gathering where Jaguar named Florence Pugh the inaugural ambassador of its new era. Jaguar described the actor as someone who embodies the originality, fearlessness and creative spirit that define the brand. Singer-songwriter Sienna Spiro played a short set.

Signal. What happened: Jaguar unveiled the Type 01, the first car of its all-electric era and the first production Jaguar built on its dedicated Jaguar Electric Architecture. Exact object: a four-door luxury GT with up to 1,030PS, a 118kWh usable battery and an expected EPA range of up to 400 miles, priced from £130,000. When and where: Tuesday, October 6, 2026, in New York, with orders opening in early 2027 and first deliveries expected in the second half of that year. Why it matters: the car is the first product evidence behind a rebrand that launched in November 2024 with a film that never showed a vehicle, and it moves Jaguar into a price bracket well above the executive saloons and SUVs that made up its recent range.

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Jaguar’s own account of the evening was not modest. The company described it as the biggest moment for the brand since the Jaguar name was born in 1935. Inside, three artefacts told the story of the car’s making: the single line its designers first drew, recast in aluminium and hung from the ceiling; a body panel Jaguar calls the Impossible Panel, offered as proof of what it took to put the shape into production; and a strip of test track scarred with tyre marks from the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of development driving.

New York was chosen on purpose. Jaguar’s release describes it as a city where art, fashion, film, music and design combine to make one of the world’s most influential centres of reinvention. The evening’s other pieces followed the same line: an intimate set from an award-winning singer-songwriter, and a menu conceived by chef Roze Traoré for the occasion. The name on the invitation carries a long history of its own. Jaguar first appeared in September 1935 as a model name on an SS saloon, and the company took the name for itself in 1945.

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The rebrand began on November 19, 2024, with a 30-second film of models in vivid, futuristic outfits walking an alien-looking landscape to a techno soundtrack, punctuated by phrases such as live vivid, delete ordinary and copy nothing. There was no car in it. The leaping cat was gone too, redrawn along with the wordmark under a design direction the company calls exuberant modernism. Elon Musk asked whether Jaguar sold cars and the company replied that it did, adding an invitation to Miami the following month.

Managing director Rawdon Glover defended the campaign as a way to start a debate and keep Jaguar from being drowned out by rivals, rather than as a political statement, but the timing made the argument harder. Jaguar had already stopped selling new cars in the UK and several other European markets while it prepared an electric-only relaunch, and the last combustion-engined car, an F-Pace, would not leave the Solihull line until December 19, 2025. For nearly two years the brand’s public identity rested on a slogan about copying nothing, attached to a range that was being wound down.

None of this came out of nowhere. JLR announced in February 2021 that Jaguar would go fully electric, and by 2023 it had said it would move the brand upmarket and shrink it into a lower-volume maker. In June 2024 production of every model except the F-Pace was halted. The film was the public face of a plan that had been running for years, and the car at the centre of it had yet to be shown.

Jaguar’s first attempt at showing metal came two weeks later. The Type 00 concept, a two-door coupe in Miami Pink and London Blue with butterfly doors, was unveiled at Miami Art Week in early December 2024. It was never meant for production, though it was the first Jaguar to wear the new logo and badge, and it met the same divided reaction as the film. What it did offer was a preview. The four-door grand tourer that followed carries the same long bonnet, low roof and strikethrough detailing at the rear, now under the name Type 01.

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The name came first. In May 2026 Jaguar confirmed that the production car would be called Type 01, a label it explains as a three-part code: “Type” nods to iconic predecessors, the zero signifies zero tailpipe emissions, and the one marks the first of a new generation. A prototype appeared at the Formula E race in Monaco in late May, and on August 12 the company released the first images of the interior ahead of a wrapped prototype’s North American debut at Monterey Car Week, which ended at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on August 16.

Reporters were also let behind the wheel. At Jaguar’s Gaydon base, a pre-production prototype was driven in a fixed comfort mode, and the engineer in charge of the architecture said the hardware was final while the software was roughly 70 percent complete. Jaguar says the finished design has a clear lineage to the E-type and the XJS, the two cars its release names as the great Jaguars of the past.

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Three motors with intelligent torque vectoring produce up to 1,030PS and 1,365Nm. Jaguar quotes 0 to 62mph in 3.2 seconds and 62 to 112mph in 4.0 seconds, the second figure offered as evidence of power held in reserve, and says know-how from the double world championship-winning Jaguar TCS Racing team helped shape the way that power is delivered. The racing programme has been a long-running one, with Jaguar committed to Formula E until 2030. The energy comes from a 118kWh usable battery on an 850-volt architecture, with an expected EPA range of up to 400 miles, up to 450 miles on the WLTP cycle, and a sustained 75mph highway range of up to 320 miles. At 350kW, Jaguar says the car can add 200 miles in as little as 13 minutes. Every figure is a manufacturer estimate pending homologation.

Jaguar frames the range in terms of daily use as much as headline mileage. A 118kWh battery and 850-volt architecture, it says, mean clients can complete up to 99.7 percent of all journeys without interruption, a figure drawn from JLR customer-journey data covering 920,000 vehicles in 51 markets between October 2023 and October 2024. The company also describes two characters in one car, composed when the road calls for comfort and dynamic when the driver asks for more, with the car shrinking around the driver on the strength of that 50:50 weight balance.

The shape comes first in Jaguar’s telling. The company says the car began as a single line on a blank sheet of paper, with a low roofline, short front overhang, long bonnet, extended rear overhang and 23-inch wheels, and was then honed in a wind tunnel to a drag coefficient of 0.23. Active Vanes and a three-stage deployable spoiler help get it there, which makes the Type 01 the most aerodynamic Jaguar road car yet. Weight distribution is 50:50, the body architecture is described as unique to Jaguar, and the programme has produced more than 360 patent applications. Buyers can choose gloss or satin finishes, press images show Visionary Silver and Compelling Blue, and the leaper appears on the fender as a sculpted piece Jaguar calls the Fender Ingot. The car measures about 5.2 metres long.

 

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Step inside and the plan changes. A central spine runs the full length of the cabin and divides it into four separate spaces, mirrored on each side by brass-effect anodised aluminium finishers that run from front to back. Chief Interior Designer Thomas Holden called the spine “an architectural statement that creates four individual spaces” when the interior was first shown in August. The idea carries over from the Type 00 concept, whose seats were separated by a brass spine. The palette draws on travertine stone and artisan textiles, and the brief was technology on demand, with storage and controls that stay out of sight until they are needed. Jaguar also stresses a confidence-inspiring GT driving position, and describes the interior as one that gives every journey a sense of occasion.

Ahead of the driver sits a 24-inch single-glass OLED Interactive Driver Display that runs the new Jaguar Infotainment. A seven-inch smartphone-style screen between the front seats carries the most common controls. Sound comes through a full-width Panoramic Soundbar, billed as an automotive first, paired with Sensory Audio seats.

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Production begins in 2027 at Solihull, with electric drive units and battery packs made in Wolverhampton and body panels pressed at Halewood on Merseyside. JLR says work on the production lines is at an advanced stage, that nearly 9,000 people at Solihull have been retrained to build electric vehicles, and that a further 1,500 have been trained across the wider West Midlands. Since announcing a five-year investment programme of £15 billion to £18 billion in 2024, the company has put £11.5 billion into engineering, design and manufacturing, most of it in the UK. Jaguar production will also support thousands of businesses across the UK automotive supply chain, including the 60,000 jobs JLR says its wider supplier network sustains in the West Midlands.

Ownership gives the launch its stakes. Ford sold both Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors in 2008, and the two businesses were folded into a single JLR operation in 2013. When JLR announced in 2023 that Jaguar would move upmarket, it did so after years of zero profitability and poor sales at the brand.

The car sits inside a wider growth plan. JLR, owned by Tata Motors, is targeting double-digit growth over the next five years through brand-led growth, a mix of combustion, hybrid and electric power across its other brands with Jaguar as the uniquely all-electric one, and a bigger push in North America. CEO PB Balaji framed the Type 01 as a way to invite a new generation of clients into Jaguar’s customer base, saying the brand is “a copy of nothing” and a vital part of the company’s growth story under its House of Brands strategy. JLR’s own timeline has each of its brands offering a pure electric model before the end of the decade, with Jaguar going entirely electric.

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Jaguar prices the Type 01 from £130,000 in the UK, and US reports put the American starting price at about $130,500. That is the territory JLR said in 2023 it wanted Jaguar to compete in, closer to Bentley and Porsche than to the executive saloons the brand built for decades.

The reception has been as divided as the concept’s. By one early tally, online reaction has split roughly evenly between admirers and detractors, with the mood warmer than it was for the Type 00. Jaguar’s own rel puts its message in three words: “Jaguar is back.” Jaguar calls the Type 01 the first of a new generation of Jaguars, and the 2024 relaunch plan called for three new electric models on the same architecture, with the four-door GT arriving first. Orders open in early 2027, with first client deliveries expected in the second half of the year.