A very merry Friday to you all, Autopians. Thank you for your continued support. “Support” is something the Jaguar brand could use a lot more of these days, so that’s how we’re kicking off today’s morning news roundup. Also on tap today: We’re talking about Ford’s big EV truck plans, Tesla’s apex predator status in China, and a crazy story that might’ve changed how we view AI in cars. Let’s get it done.
I’m Telling You Right Now That This Doesn’t Seem Great
Man, Jaguar. What on earth happened there? It feels like just yesterday (it was actually the middle of the last decade now) when the British luxury icon seemed to be mounting a major comeback with an onslaught of new models like the XE and XF sedans, F-Pace crossover and the delightful F-Type sports car. Hell, it was even an early pioneer in the modern EV space with the I-Pace, which for a minute was one of the only cars that could really handle itself against Tesla. [Editor’s Note: Could it, though? -DT].
But that onslaught of new products we saw starting about eight years ago never really translated to sales, certainly not on the BMW- and Mercedes-fighting level Jaguar wanted. Now things look kinda bleak for the brand. It’s still one-half of the Jaguar Land Rover conglomerate owned by India’s Tata, but Land Rover is by far the one paying the bills and posting the sales figures. The market shift toward SUVs (especially luxury ones) really benefitted the latter brand over the former.
Now Jaguar is asking many of its dealers to cash out. This doesn’t feel great. Here’s Automotive News with the details:
Ford’s Got Big Electric Truck Plans
Speaking of EVs, we all know Ford is taking a huge bath there. But this is all par for the course. Ford separated its conventional car and EV operations into two separate business units, and one’s essentially paying for the other. It, like other automakers, intends to lose money while it ramps up R&D, engineering and production to support EVs.
It has big plans for trucks, specifically, which makes sense because this is Ford we’re talking about. And not even the Lightning; the next F-150 and its electric variants, to be made at a kind of gigafactory in Tennesse. Here’s The Detroit News on these plans:
“Trust the Truck.”
That’s the saying behind the code name of the next-generation F-Series truck Ford Motor Co. will build at its under-construction, $5.6 billion mega-campus in West Tennessee. The Dearborn automaker on Friday offered its first teaser on the product that will be built at BlueOval City, revealing that it is codenamed ‘Project T3.’
The teaser came ahead of an event executives will host on the campus later Friday morning, where they will highlight construction progress ahead of the operation’s 2025 opening and a workforce development initiative aimed at preparing some 6,000 people to take on jobs there. The initiative encompasses K-12 STEM programs, postsecondary education partnerships and technical training.
Ford has yet to offer any other details about the truck that will be assembled there. It will be a follow-up to the automaker’s inaugural battery-electric pickup, the F-150 Lightning, production of which launched last spring at the historic Rouge manufacturing complex in Dearborn. The automaker is working to ramp up production of the Lightning.
Tesla didn’t just cut prices in America earlier this year. It also did so in China, though for various cultural reasons, this didn’t go over very well. But it was remarkably effective in forcing EV competitors there to have to slash their prices too, putting nearly all of them (save for BYD, another giant) at a major disadvantage. This is what you can do when you have Tesla’s EV production scale. It even hammered Western legacy brands in that country too.
Here’s Bloomberg on the effect of these cuts:
The moves left rivals with little option but to follow suit. Among them were local EV upstarts such as Xpeng Inc. and Nio Inc. as well as leading international brands like Volkswagen Group and Mercedes-Benz Group, which offered discounts of up to 70,000 yuan ($10,000). Ford Motor Co.’s Mach-E electric crossover is down to a starting price of 209,900 yuan, about a third cheaper than in the U.S.
“Tesla created havoc for rest of the market,” said Jochen Siebert, managing director of JSC Automotive, a consultancy with offices in Shanghai and Stuttgart.
At least 30 more carmakers have cut prices, according to calculations by Bloomberg News and local media.
[…] With the increasing adoption of EVs, China’s auto market is going through a “a very profound reshuffle,” Nio Chief Financial Officer Steven Feng told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday.
There’s a kind of fallacy among the hardcore Tesla stans that posts it could become the Apple of cars, something with 50%+ market share of cars globally. I think that’s insane to think about. The truth is that Tesla’s scale, and profit margins, do put it at a huge advantage over other EV manufacturers right now, especially in China. And China is also full of smaller EV brands you’ve probably never heard of. As in America, it stands to reason that not all of them will make it.
Elon Musk Almost Bought ChatGPT (???)
Finally, here’s some Elon Musk-related news that I do feel is interesting enough to warrant a mention here. News startup Semafor today reports that Musk actually tried to buy OpenAI—the generative AI text startup that’s either bullshit or The Next Big Thing That Will Change Everything®—way back in early 2018. That’s way before its ChatGPT product started making the waves it is now.
But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google, people familiar with the matter said.
And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.
Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company — and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that’s changing the world, and the company at the heart of it.
This led to a war between Musk and Altman (Musk loves a good beef) that’s going on today. But the timing is quite strange, as the story notes; Tesla was really struggling with production hell issues in 2018 and Altman and OpenAI were nobodies in Silicon Valley. Things went the way they went and now Musk now aims to launch his own AI startup.
Why mention this here? Because autonomous car setbacks aside, AI is poised to play a big role in the future of cars. The news reports around this were way overblown, but General Motors has posited ways generative AI could be used in-car to assist drivers in the not-so-distant future.
One imagines a different timeline where a version of ChatGPT (or something similar) ends up in Tesla’s cars, is what I’m saying. Who knows if there would’ve been overlap between two Musk companies, but given the scale of his ambitions and how he’s assigned Tesla engineers to fix stuff at Twitter, it’s plausible. Either way, expect more news about AI in cars in the coming years, even if it takes a while to get there.
Your Turn
On a vacation to the English countryside, you come upon an ancient sword buried in a stone during a hike in an idyllic forest. You pull the sword from the stone; suddenly, the wizard Merlin appears and tells you that you are the first person in centuries to accomplish this feat.
And since you can’t be made King or Queen of England because those people are absolutely insufferable, you have instead been made CEO of Jaguar Land Rover. Your first job is to fix the Jaguar brand.
Brave knight foretold in legend, bearer of the mighty Excalibur, defender of the crown and powerful green saloons: What do you do to fix the mess at Jag?
Just make the F-Type like half price and I’m in Jaguar!
Or just make restomods of the old, awesome sheet metal models. Hell just toss a small block in there.
Regarding Tesla and driving some of the Chinese companies out of business… consider that there are over 50 Chinese car companies… not brands, companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturers_of_China
In essence, a shakeout is going to happen regardless of what Tesla does or did. Some will go out of business and some will get absorbed by bigger companies.
And some of the companies would have died years ago if the car market in China wasn’t such a big sellers market.
We need to think about electrification of vehicles like the evolution of the current car manufacturing progression. A LOT of car companies have gone belly-up or been acquired between 1910-1980. The electric car industry should go the same way, yet likely on a shorter time frame.
I’m curious to see if Tesla will be a survivor or not. Their anti-worker rights culture can be likened to the union busting that Ford actively encouraged not so many dozens of years ago. That edge might be a benefit, or their talent might abandon them at the most crucial moments.
I wonder if a new constituency will emerge. One consisting of people who certainly aren’t Amish, but also don’t want what coming. By that I mean they reject AI, self-driving, and other things that we are being told is inevitable
I think the main problem Jaguar actually has is that it’s customers are getting old. They’re not a trendsetting demographic, and so it’s customer base is slowly disappearing. Even the I-pace seems to be bought only by the conservative and elderly segment of EV customers. How to turn this around?
are they actually old or is it just a trope? British Youtubers seem to deride the jags as if they were Cadillac’s in the US, but they almost always just poke fun at 20 year old models that held the traditional styling.
Perhaps it is a deserving thing or maybe not, the current cars certainly look sporty and good, but the few gains they had with Ford at the helm with regard to perceived quality seem to have drastically fallen off. Or at least that is my perception, land rovers are in a similar boat. I feel like they were surviving off Rapper and Gangster image to get sales and that ship has sailed.
People who can afford new Jags are mostly old.
“It needs to unveil a real reset plan with some hype around it, and soon”
Not sure “hype” is really a Jaguar thing.
I have an F-Pace and 100% love it. It has 30-couple thousand miles on it, so I’m not looking for a replacement any time soon, but when that time comes I’m not sure which way to go. Possibly back to the LR side of the group, depending how the J lineup shakes out, but I’ll be disappointed if there isn’t an updated F-Pace (or its equivalent) by then.
However, it will be much more disappointing if the company doesn’t exist in a meaningful way. There is a lot of history in the marque and it would be a shame for that to come to an ignominious end.
Automakers have been using AI in their product development for years. That’s why everything is a big silver/grey/black/white truck.
Jaguar should stop making new cars and just offer to resto-mod pre-Ford era Jags with new running gear.
“Man, Jaguar. What on earth happened there?”
They went down market chasing volume instead of upmarket to cultivate a stronger brand following. They started off well with the F-type, XJ, and XF, but instead of keeping them updated and fresh, they followed up with the lukewarm pudding that is the XE and E-pace. Now the entire range looks dated.
Not that I know much about this stuff, but if I pulled the sword from the stone, I’d do the following at Jaguar (in no particular order).
1). Kill the models that a) lose money or b) sell so slowly that they’re just a waste of production line capacity.
2). Systemically figure out where these quality/reliability problems are coming from and figure out what to do to fix them, even if it loses a lot of money in the short term. Doesn’t matter if it takes 5 years to fully right the ship, we need to get it going in the right direction.
3). Invest heavily in new models people are actually interested in buying.
4). Brexit sucks for us? Move most production out of the UK. Nobody cares that American cars are build in Mexico/Canada and that Japanese cars are built in the US. Invest in factories in countries like China, the US, and EU countries where we still have ok sales. This will bypass a lot of issues at the border, will potentially save a lot on costs (at least in China) and in the US will make our upcoming electric cars more competitive ($7500 rebate).
5.) Market that shit heavily. Not enough people think of a Jaguar as the car they want to buy. We need to change that. Offer Hyundai/KIA levels of warranty coverage to show that we’re serious about product quality.
If Jaguar becomes the Toyota of the luxury space while still maintaining a certain degree of unique presence and desirability, it’s sales will go up as people become loyal to the brand. And update the lineup more than every decade or so.
Long-term profitability unlocked.
Beyond just providing a sales bump Tesla now knows how much can re-raise prices to without the others being able to compete.
“There’s a kind of fallacy among the hardcore Tesla stans that posts it could become the Apple of cars, something with 50%+ market share of cars globally.”
Which is in the running for the most batshit, pure nonsense to come out of their mouths. Toyota is by far and away the world’s largest car maker by volume, period. Not “in North America.” Period. Worldwide. Nobody is even close.
They sold 1,084,805 vehicles in March of 2021. Alone. And that was an objectively slow period with significant declines. GM sold roughly one third as many vehicles in that same month.
Toyota’s total global market share is estimated at around 30-35%.
“Finally, here’s some Elon Musk-related news that I do feel is interesting enough to warrant a mention here.”
No.
“News startup Semafor today reports that Musk actually tried to buy OpenAI—the generative AI text startup that’s either bullshit or The Next Big Thing That Will Change Everything®—way back in early 2018.”
Nope.
“This led to a war between Musk and Altman (Musk loves a good beef) that’s going on today.”
Absolutely fucking not.
You don’t have the technology chops I do. Anything involving Sam Altman stinks to high heaven and is more likely than not single-sourced bullshit where that single source is Sam Altman himself, or every corroboration just happens to be someone from YC or the same circle of scumbags.
Imagine Musk with less money and you’re not far off. Hates mostly the same people. Runs with the same crowd of vocal and avowed white-supremacists. And has never once spoken out against them.
And holy fuck, characterizing him as a “nobody” in 2018? He’s a silver spoon asshole who was involved with the YC cult from day one and was the president of it until 2019. You wanted to be a ‘unicorn,’ then you had to have Sam Altman’s personal blessing.
I don’t care if Musk is involved. You should not be giving ink to the YC cult and it’s members here. And believe me, if any of this was even remotely true or factual, I’d have heard the screaming from Sand Hill ages ago. That article is nothing but revisionist history to further two children’s ongoing temper tantrums.
And yes. Technology is a fucking terrible place full of absolutely fucking terrible people, particularly in Silly-con Valley and ‘startup culture.’ It’s why I avoid the hell out of them.
“And since you can’t be made King or Queen of England because those people are absolutely insufferable, you have instead been made CEO of Jaguar Land Rover. Your first job is to fix the Jaguar brand.”
Hello, Geely? You still in the market for car companies?
I’d take the brand in the direction of Morgan and go back to E-types and classic saloons, but with modern underpinnings and systems. I’d avoid EVs for the present with an eye on adding them back when the next generation of battery tech is emergent. Don’t try to be a volume leader or build “world” cars. Focus on craft, quality and a distinctly British aesthetic.
Eagle E-Types has tapped into the high end of this market with some subtle, but striking updates to the E. A similar design approach melded to a thoroughly modern car beneath the skin could save the marque by positioning it as a halo line.
Speaking as a Jaguar owner who fully appreciates the history and significance of the brand…
Jaguar is a perfect marque for electrification. Jaguars should be gorgeous, luxurious, and have sneaky-good performance with the occasional legitimate belter in there that can give a Tesla Plaid a run for its money. Be politically incorrect and give me that beautiful burl wood and Connolly leather (the leather in my ’88 STILL smells amazing!)
Instead, their toe in the water of electrification was some anonymous small crossover. Let the Land Rover part of JLR handle the crossover and SUV market. The brand might be able to survive if they move it upmarket and really start to compete with the EQS and whatever BMW/Audi decide to do with their big sedans. A modern successor to the XK120 or E-type wouldn’t hurt, either. Jaguars will never sell in big numbers, but I suspect some pretty decent profit margins could be had while serving as a halo brand. What they are doing right now dooms them to certain death.
Our current dream car: an electrified Lynx Eventer XJ-S shooting brake.
I think they have to stop targeting BMW and Mercedes’s and focus on performance and halo cars. They need to be targeting Ferrari and McLaren. Beautiful, high performance, bedroom wall poster cars, that 99% of people can’t afford. Their reputation is shot for anyone who cares about reliability, resale value, etc. They need to pursue the customers for who that does not matter. Their name still has an association with opulence, performance and luxury. They need to embrace that.
Jaguar lost their way when they stopped using the hood ornament 🙁
That cat on the hood is awesome 😀
The X-Type wagon was the best Jag ever!!!!!!!
Yes, Toecutter, I know the leaper is bad for drag/aero (by the way, fully appreciate your contributions despite this comment)
Yes, NHTSA, I know the leaper is hazardous for pedestrians.
Yes, judgy people, I know it’s perhaps a bit ostentatious.
But dang, I love my leaper!
So, uhh, 1968? Maybe earlier? The original XJ6 didn’t have a leaper. The XJ-S didn’t have a leaper. The E-Type, D-Type, XK120 and such? No leapers. Hood ornaments are a relic, emblematic of a march towards irrelevancy that’s doomed Jaguar.
Although, I do want an X-Type Wagon.
The leaper looks awful on modern Jaguars.
When it topped the radiator, a hood ornament was a nice classy touch. When it topped the grille, it was nice, slightly silly style element to remind you of days past.
Now it looks like a trinket a tacky grandma would stick on her 76 Monte Carlo. It’s an option, but you can keep it. I wouldn’t have a car with one. I don’t want a little chromed dildo sticking out of a random blank spot on my hood.
For “England” read “Jaguar” throughout:
https://xkcd.com/1521/
Jags have never been hyper-luxury, so the current plan seems like a death knell. Even their outrageous cars like the XJ220 were more about function than posh.
I would pretend the last 20 years never happened and update the mid aughts lineup to today’s market. Add 3 SUVs, give the XK a proper halo car version and at least put PHEV options in the full range with plans for BEVs in the next couple years.
6 vehicles seems about right for a Jaguar portfolio. And toss in a supercar concept to give people something to chat about.
Jaguar used to have Daimler, and, before that, Lanchester, for their hyper-luxury products, the fact that even at their height, they still used a separate marque for that segment shows that their leadership understood your point at one time.
They’ve also got Vanden Plas, but that’s been mostly used as a Jaguar trim level in recent decades
The AI stuff is going to turn out to be a big deal in automotive space, but not for the reasons most commentators think. Sure, there will be the “AI driver assist” stuff but most of that will end up being implemented by Google and Apple because car manufacturers mostly suck as UI. The real benefit to auto companies is predictive maintenance — using AI to sort all of the sensor data coming in to alert a user when a vehicle needs some love. We’re already seeing this in the aerospace and networking areas; imagine a part just showing up to your local dealer and the car being scheduled for service. You’ll get an alert that there’s a potential problem and all of the parts will be available and ready for install. Very nifty.
The thing is none of that needs AI, and in fact AI is arguably a bad choice for implementing it (at least the machine-learning version of it that everyone is talking about right now). Many years ago I worked on software that did essentially what you’re talking about. One of the things that would happen because of our software was that our support organization could phone customers up and tell them they had a failed hard drive, fan, etc. in a server before they even realized it. No AI required, unless you use the hopelessly broad definition that encompasses basically anything computer-based.
And is AI even a good fit for this? I’m not sure it is. For AI to recognize something it needs a huge database of similar things for it to extrapolate from. That’s why Tesla uses its entire customer base as the data set for their autonomous driving tech. It’s why ChatGPT uses the entire internet as the data set for a chat bot. In order for AI to at all reliably diagnose failures you’d need to have a massive list of failures for it to look at first. I’m sure you could do it, but is it the best way? I’m dubious.
Is there a place for AI? Sure. Will it ever move beyond things with the disclaimer “for entertainment purposes only”? I am less sure, at least in its current form.
A valid point. I’m seeing AI start to show up in spots where multiple ML models are reporting; it seems like a logical way to sense across multiple domains. We’ll see.
Two words: Golden Parachute
How do I fix Jaguar?
Step 1: Collect Underpants
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
But really it’s either go fucking hard on the new electric XJ with a return to the classic styling and mechanical engineering that Jaguar did so well, of grace, pace, and space. Next step is take same underpinnings and make the new CUV’s of large and small. Then electric XJ Coupe, because I have a feeling that proper personal luxury coupes are going to make a comeback.
Or take the poor kitty out back behind the woodshed, and put Jaguar out of it’s misery.
The first thing I would do is slay Merlin with that sword. He’s a loyalist, after all.
I’d just fall on the sword – it’d be much less painful than running JLR, and the end result would be the same.
There was a time when Jaguars had, well, individuality. They were unapologetically what they were, which was high-performance, stylish sports cars and sedans, and they really didn’t offer much direct, point-by-point competition to other makes. If you wanted a Jaguar, that’s what you bought.
What did a buyer cross-shop before buying an E-Type or 3.8 sedan? Nothing, really. The enticements were looks, presentation, and the driving experience. Somewhere along the line, the Brand Managers stepped in, and Jaguars had to compete with other makes. That was, I think, the beginning of the end. Later Jaguars still had the looks (mostly), but lacked the individuality.
Jaguar is not the only company that has gone down that path. The pursuit of currently popular buzzwords — such as “electrification” — has taken away the selling proposition. Only the badges are left.
Jag shoppers in those days may have also considered Astons, and probably Mercedes just because it’s the benchmark.
But you have a point, Jag guys were very loyal back then.
The slow death of coupes did not help Jaguar, as their flagship models were sex-on-wheels to look at. I still love the Jaguar coupes, but I’m also not buying one. (I AM part of the problem, but I’m also not employed in a golden-parachute or stock-option kind of industry.)
I saw a Jaguar yesterday and realized how long ago it was that I saw another. I’d focus on the I-Pace and its replacement and preempt the Tesla Roadster (shouldn’t be too hard), people love blathering on about the E-type. This one should also be competitively priced, as was the E-type when it came out. Then the remainder of the range will just sort itself out as electric and sportier than the Land Rovers on which they are based.
What’s the price of of a BZ4X in China? I’m hearing about steep discounts, yet over here Toyota dealerships are marking them up…
Look, I’m gonna say it, Jaguar lost their way. They did better (maybe not still to expectations, but better, and the sales goals Ford had been setting up to the sale to Tata were never realistic anyway) when they had their own style with classically elegant looks and gorgeous wood and leather interiors. Trying to turn themselves into a British BMW imitation faile even worse than Cadillac’s repeated attempts to turn themselves into an American BMW imitation. Customers who want a BMW can just buy the real thing, luxury brands need to be true to themselves.
This is the correct perspective. I’m on my second Jaguar now, used ones yes but they’ve been good to me. My current is a 2006 XJ8 that still looks great and like nothing else on the road, I get compliments on it still (last week even). It’s beautiful inside and still smells great and if I need to cover 200 miles quickly, that’s the car I’d take.
As Dennis Green said, they are who we thought they were, and the minute they got away from that in the search for German-equivalent volume is when it all went awry. Which is too bad, because owning a Jaguar was kind of unique and put you somewhere else. If it goes away that “somewhere else” isn’t really available anywhere else save for Bentley or Aston Martin, which are obviously much less (or not) attainable for commoners like myself, even on the used market.
For a long time I recommended Jaguars to people, because the old (wrong) adage of Jaguars being maintenance nightmares scared people off, and resale values were very reasonable. You could get into a VERY nice car for Chevy money. The way things are going now however, will the dealers even be around in five years?
You wanna crown their asses then CROWN “EM.
So right! I have two 1997 Jaguars (XJ6 & XJR6), and I have no idea what to replace them with as daily drivers when they age. I already feel bad putting commuting miles on the my very clean XJR6.
The mix of ride and handling is sublime, and I like the old school wood and leather interiors. I was mixed on the x351 XJs interior, but at least the car looked and felt special the way a Jaguar should. Every Jaguar since has grown more ordinary and less JAGUAR.
Kinda a boring dump…..
Sounds like you’re perfectly regulating your fiber and water intake then.
Yeah, one of those things you WANT to be boring.
I don’t control the news, friend. I merely tell you about it.
Think bigger, Tomorrow Never Dies.
Kind of a boring comment….