Advertising: Jag edge - the wild cat of marques mutates into a green-eyed monster

When they move on to the new XJ, it doesn't look any different from any Jaguar saloon you ever saw

Time was – about a year ago – that Jaguar seemed to be setting its cap at a different kind of buyer – a younger, more rainswept, more informal, more romantic kind of person with a newer taste in music. That was the kind of moody commercial the car company was making then.

But now it has changed its tune. Jaguar has got a new commercial that doesn't bother itself with people at all. It's all about the product.

From the depths of a pool of molten aluminium – shot to look rather like that mid-Nineties oil installation thing they have at the Saatchi Gallery – rises a mythical metal beast. It's the Jaguar hood ornament it doesn't actually use any more. It's black and white and the room's top-lit, studio fashion.

Did you see the BBC's Predators programme where big cats on the move suddenly turned X-ray transparent? You could see their skeletons running and jumping and killing.

This mythical Deco-ish hood ornament does something like that. Its silvery skin shimmies off, to show a most elegant set of pistons and gears and drive shafts, throbbing and engaging and rotating in a rhythmic kind of way to the new music (Moby, actually).

You see it from a variety of angles – this simulation of a motor that never was, that couldn't drive a milk-cart – and, just like most Jaguars, it looks lovely from every one of them. And vaguely sinister.

And then – and this is the bit that could look downright scary to the under-10s – its eyes flash bright laser-green headlamp beams. (I'd love to know how the more imaginative kind of researcher described focus group reactions to all this – the "reading" of the myths and legends that went into it, and their conclusions about what people took out of it.)

"The all-new lightweight aluminium Jaguar XJ – it's an entirely different animal," says the entirely forgettable voiceover. Now there's one for the boys, a sentence so delicious you could lick it clean – every word a promise. It's all new – that's really a lot of new – it's aluminium and it's a Jaguar.

But it's also, amazingly, an entirely different animal from the old kind of Jaguar. What could that be? And is it a good thing, anyway, since people generally like Jaguars, and wouldn't like, say, genetically modified Glasgow tabbies nearly so much? But the fact is that, when they move through to the all-new XJ itself in the silvery gloom, it doesn't look remotely different from any Jaguar saloon you ever saw or dreamed about.

Peter@sru.co.uk