New all-electric Jaguar range to start under £100,000 – but won’t be available until 2026

Exclusive: Jaguar is being reinvented as a luxury brand, and prices will be lower than anticipated

Launched in 2018, the Jaguar I-Pace was the brand’s first all-electric production vehicle (Jaguar)

Jaguar cars as we know them will go off sale this November, before the brand is reinvented as an all-electric luxury brand. The first new car is due to go on sale in 2026, and the range will start at less than £100,000.

The automaker is expected to reveal a design vision concept at the end of this year, giving us our first clues to what the new Jaguar range will look like and marking a change in the brand identity, not just the vehicles. All we currently know is that everything Jaguar does will be ‘a copy of nothing’, referencing a phrase coined by Jaguar founder William Lyons.

Three new models are expected to be launched in the new line-up. The first – a striking new four-door sporting saloon – is expected to be unveiled at the end of next year and go on sale in 2026. An SUV will follow, along with Jaguar’s new take on a coupé shape. All we have seen so far is a disguised image of the rear of a low-slung car, suggesting wide, squared-off haunches at the back with a narrower glasshouse and slim rear lights.

The Jaguar I-Pace was revealed in 2016 as the brand’s first electric car (Jaguar)

Jaguar managing director Rawdon Glover admits that dealers are in for a “tough few years”, with nothing to sell until 2026, before a slow ramp up to the new three-car range.

Future Jaguars are set to be more affordable than first thought. Previous JLR boss Thierry Bollore had said that the new range would start at over £100,000, but Glover has revealed that the range will start under the crucial £100,000 mark.

Speaking exclusively to The Independent, Glover said “the range will come in a little bit below £100,000, but the weighted average will probably be above £100,000 in most markets”.

Glover also hinted at what to expect from the design, saying, “if you look at the EV market, particularly at the moment, today it’s quite derivative. It’s aero-led, it’s cab forward. So our view is that everybody’s doing that and we’re not.

“Our car isn’t going to look like it’s been designed in the wind tunnel. It’s got very, very specific proportions, it looks like it’s been carved from a single piece of material. And it’s about going back to that level of confidence and fearlessness to say: no, we are going to do this and it might not be what everybody else is doing.

“It might not be to everybody’s taste, but we’ve got to really believe in that design and then execute it with absolute conviction. It still looks like a car, it’s still going to have four wheels, it’s still got a steering wheel, but it doesn’t look like any other car on the road, and that’s a high bar.”

Despite the need for Jaguar to appeal to far-eastern buyers, Glover has promised that the new Jaguars won’t be influenced by those markets’ desire for glitzy designs. In fact, 120 potential Chinese clients have already seen the entire new Jaguar range as part of a customer clinic programme.

The new electric line-up is still under wraps. Jaguar hints at the design of the new cars with this teaser image (Jaguar)

“China has some very specific requirements,” said Glover. “But I don’t think the requirements are necessarily in design. For us, [those requirements] are things like really good voice activation, there’s a level of expectation around a level of autonomy. Things like power doors, things like screens are important for the Chinese.”

Despite JLR design chief Gerry McGovern’s obsession with ‘reductionism’ and taking knobs and buttons out of JLR cars, Glover promised that usability would be key inside the new Jaguars.

“What you will see in our car will be very clean, it’ll be very simple,” said Glover, “It’s an important part of our design philosophy and we will see elements of that in the interior. But for ease of navigation, we’ve worked probably harder on the user experience than any vehicle I’ve been involved with.”

Although Jaguar will use its own platform – known as JEA or Jaguar Electric Architecture – and batteries will be unique to Jaguar, Glover revealed that the electronic systems powering things like infotainment will be common with other JLR products like Range Rovers.

However, Glover did promise that JLR’s reputation for reliability problems would be laid to rest with the new Jaguars. “We won’t go until it’s ready,” he said.

“The worst thing we could possibly do is push a car to market before we were utterly confident in everything from software to battery to chassis to whatever else. We’re aiming for 2026, but if it’s not, then it’ll be there when it’s ready. We’re trying to reposition the brand and what we can’t do is open up reliability. Why would you pay £120,000 for that vehicle? So that’s super important.”