Jaguar has officially unveiled its long-awaited Type 01 purely electric car in New York on Tuesday, October 6. The manufacturer is attempting to repeat the past, not with copycat styling from its bin of classics, but with a car so bold it turns heads like the sleek E-Type sports car once did.
The Type 01 eliminates the soft, sensuous curves, feline haunches, oval grilles, long power-bulge hoods, and old-world wood-and-leather interiors of Jaguar classics such as the Mark II, E-Type, XJS, and XJ6.
Jaguar replaced those styling cues with a reductionist design philosophy. The Type 01 is a long, wide, low-roofed, four-door sedan with a rear hatch. Its smooth body is shorn of flashy chrome bling, superfluous vents, swage lines, indentations, and other visual clutter.
When Jaguar showed its prototype car some while ago, the car and the new Jaguar style it launched with created serious controversy. It still does; now we’re looking at the real thing. “It should be polarizing,” says Andy Wheel, Jaguar’s director of design development. “It should have a sense of never having been seen before, a sense of like nothing else, and a sense of wow.”
‘Strike-through’
The grille is upright and angled, designed to push air around the fenders. The flush headlights, each with 20,000 LEDs, are simple narrow slits just over 8 cm wide. Active grille shutters, mounted low on the front fascia, channel air to the brakes, powertrain, and climate control system. Jaguar indicates that the Type 01, with a drag coefficient of 0.23, is its most aerodynamic production car ever.
A series of simple lines that Jaguar calls “strike-through” is the car’s main design theme. It’s used on the front and rear fascias and elsewhere. The cowl area in front of the windshield has an arcing series of long slits.
The one-piece rear aluminum quarter panels that incorporate the roof sections take Jaguar into new design territory. Each side of the car has what Jaguar body engineers call the ‘impossible panel’.
These huge pressings start at the top of the windshield and extend to the back of the car, incorporating the bulging rear fenders and rear deck on each side of the upward-opening hatchback..The intricate panels contribute to the car’s smooth exterior, evident in the sharp creases where the rear fenders transition into the side panels and then extend forward to become the sloping roof.
The car measures 5,20 meters long, 2 meters wide, and only 1.40 meters high. Despite its serious proportions, rear passenger space seems limited. Designers wanted a (technically unnecessary) very long hood, and that affects rear space. With the restricted height and relatively small door opening, getting in and out of the car will also require some acquaintance.
The sparse interior wants to contrast, even shock
The Type 01’s interior also gets the reductionist treatment. No button, switch, or knob sits on the dash. The Type 01 responds to voice commands and screen inputs to control major functions. Compared to other ultra-luxury cars, it’s very sparse and lacks practically every ornament.
A three-section, 24-inch OLED screen sits behind the steering wheel, with driving functions on the left, speed in the center, and navigation information on the right.
A phone-sized, 7-inch screen is mounted at the front of the full-length console. From there, front-seat occupants can manage the climate and sound systems. But Jaguar expects drivers or passengers to use the voice recognition system to operate the vehicle’s controls. The Type 01’s electrical architecture is sourced from Nvidia. The console runs to the rear of the passenger area, separating the rear seats.
Jaguar manners
A familiar Jaguar trait, nevertheless, remains. The new car had to drive and feel like Jaguars from the past. Jaguar engineers spent hours driving classic Jags on test tracks to figure out how to adapt the brand’s traditional driving personality of refined performance and tenacious but civilized handling to an electric car, weighing 2.7 tons, with a heavy battery pack and a low center of gravity.
“Think of the 5.3-liter V-12 of the ‘60s and ‘70s,” says Jon Darlington, Type 01’s chief engineer. “That was a super quiet powertrain, powerful in its day. It always had this power-in-reserve kind of feeling, always more power than you need. It never felt like it was running out of go.”
“And that’s how we’ve tuned this car. It’s not about instant, unrefined torque. The way the car drives and steers is a Jaguar trait we built into this car,” he proudly adds.
The Type 01’s three electric motors (one in the front, two in the back) produce up to 750 kW/1,015 hp and 1,300 Nm of torque and deliver a sprint to 100 km/h in about 3.2 seconds. The 850-volt electrical system enables fast charging (up to 350 kW) of the huge 120 kWh battery pack, for a driving range of up to 700 km. The car has two charging ports, one on each side; it can add 300 km of range in as little as 12 minutes.
New customers required
Jaguar expects roughly 80% of Type 01 buyers will be new to the brand. About 50,000 have signaled interest in the car. The company started accepting deposits after the October 6 debut and will soon know how serious those potential customers are.
Deliveries in Europe and North America will start next year, possibly by early summer. The Asian launch will follow. The Type 01 will be priced at around $130,000 before options in the US, around €165,000 in Europe. That’s roughly twice as much as previous Jaguars, the last of which, the F-Pace, was discontinued last December.
Type 01 customers, therefore, will have to be (very) affluent. They’ll normally own a fleet of expensive cars. “And they’ll want at least one bold-looking car that delivers a sense of occasion,” Jaguar says (and hopes). But Jaguar MD Randon Glover says the Type 01 and two other new-generation Jaguars on the way are not intended to be high-volume vehicles.
“We are going to measure our success in the tens of thousands, not hundreds, when the portfolio is up and running in all markets,” he said. JLR expects Miami, New York, and California to be key markets for the Type 01 in the US. “It was born to be there,” Glover adds.
