The electric four-door GT that will spearhead an all-new era for Jaguar will be revealed at the end of the year and go into production in the middle of 2026.
In an exclusive meeting with Autocar at Jaguar’s Gaydon headquarters, Jaguar boss Rawdon Glover said in a wide-ranging interview that the 986bhp GT is “right in the midst” of prototype testing on public roads, at JLR’s Gaydon proving ground and in the Arctic Circle as it gears up for launch.
Glover said the focus so far has been on the new brand and the design for Jaguar but it will soon enter “a very different phase” where the company will talk more about the engineering, architecture and dynamics of the car.
He expects to win over some of the more dissenting voices about the new Jaguar at this point as the brand looks to capture the essence of the best Jaguars from history in the way the new GT drives.
To date, development has been “the complete opposite of how everything used to work”, according to Glover, with total unity between design and engineering to achieve such an extreme and radically different look, instead of designing around a platform or vice versa.
Given the dramatic styling, proportions and sharp angles of the new Jaguars, as previewed by the Type 00 concept, careful consideration has been given to, for instance, crash testing and the aerodynamic performance needed to achieve a targeted 430 miles of range for the four-door GT in its most efficient form.
“We’ve got some incredibly talented engineers who took that challenge on,” said Glover. “Their job is to maintain the design integrity and come up with something that meets all of the current stipulations for a vehicle – homologation, safety, whatever else – and to do so in a way that brings all of the very best of what a Jaguar should be as a driving car.”
On the way the car drives, Glover said the chassis team took the greatest Jaguars of all time, “spent days driving the vehicles” and then looked at “what is it about them that is unique and is absolutely inherently Jaguar, and what can we take from this?”.
The goal is not to create sports cars, but rather cars “you can drive confidently at pace for extended periods and still come out feeling great”.