By now, pretty much everyone has seen or knows about that new Jaguar ad which they show every new Jaguar car on sale today, which is nothing, because they're taking a year off to develop the new Jaguars which will compete with Bentley and other such expensive product.
The ad was strange, but clever in the way that people started talking about Jaguar. I pretty much decided to give them the benefit of the doubt until the product was shown and maybe it would knock me out.
Well, it did, but not in a good way.
My god, WTF is up with that? A ultra luxury car should ooze passion and not be a soulless blob like this. It looks like ironed out tin foil, with no character on a generic coupe design.
This does nothing for me and the design would have a hard time competing with the $30,000 bracket. If they had the same performance would anyone pick this over a Subaru BRZ? This totally doesn't work in the Bentley segment.
Interesting view from Ricard Truett (Automotive News) who has seen the new Jag:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DC4WQ3bs84b/?igsh=MW8yZWgzODFlZm5rdw%3D%3D
Some think it’s still the 80s and turbos suck. Some think only V8s are cool. Most are used to the 2.7 in edge and nautilus and drive like a bat out of hell so the 2.0 is slow by comparison.
Yea, Europe has been a sore spot for Ford in that regard but the situation isn't much better in the U.S. Hopefully the skunkworks will pay off sooner rather than later in terms of Ford adding BEV models to keep up with the competition
Eh, they've let their cars and SUVs languish with long product cycles, especially in Europe, vs. competitors that have kept ICE products up to date (and adding models) while also adding BEV models.
The front of this looks ok. The back is a fucking disaster. As an aspiring designer myself, I can't stand it when an otherwise somewhat decent design is ruined because someone wanted to get "quirky". In this case, with the taillight placement.
I could rant about this all day long, but it's the state of design education that's to blame. What do I mean? As someone who's visited car design schools in person and mingled with that crowd, I can tell you there are some genuinely awesome car people. But you also have a ton, and I mean a TON of the pretentious art snobs.
Car design schools are also insanely expensive, 300k in student loans expensive. Which means a good portion of the people who go there come from wealth, not all, but again, a lot of them. The education itself is also all about being different, do weird shit. Just look at the design proposals students make and you'll see what I mean. If you made something classically beautiful, you'd be thrown out of the program.
So how does that get us here? It means our cars are styled by mostly wealthy people who can't relate to average consumers and what they want, and who want to make things look weird for the sake of weird, because that's what they were taught to do. We need to rethink the world of design education imo.