For a good chunk of the 20th century and all of the 21st, Jaguar, the Sisyphus of the automotive industry, has spent most of the last 50 years pushing the boulder of reinvention and rejuvenation up a steep hill, only to watch it roll down to the bottom, again and again.
This time will be different, we're told. "We're at the start of the beginning, really," says Ralf Speth, Jaguar Land Rover CEO. "We have just restructured both brands (Jaguar and Land Rover) and now we have the opportunity to grow further. Now we have the opportunity to invest more money in engineering, so that we can empower the complete product creation process."
With the launch of the Jaguar XE high-volume sedan and the equally high-volume Range Rover Discovery Sport, we'll learn if the most recent revival plan will work. No matter how this tale ends, it's a delight, with so many twists and turns, a long saga of grand ambitions thwarted time after time.
This most recent chapter begins with Tata, the sprawling Indian conglomerate which bought JLR from a near-bankrupt Ford Motor in 2008 for $2.3-billion (all figures U.S.). JLR is now profitable, but it took Tata stuffing billions more into it before the returns started to arrive.
Tata quickly determined that turning around JLR would require order, discipline and hope – hope because the dispirited bunch within JLR had lived through so much, almost all of it bad. So Tata turned to the Germans to fix its British car company.
The first important German boss was former BMW development chief Carl-Peter Forster, who arrived in 2010. Then Speth convinced another former BMW engineering whiz, Wolfgang Ziebart, to oversee the product plan in 2013. Ziebart retired in April but is staying on as a consultant to the new product head, Nick Rogers, a 47-year-old Brit.
If anyone knows the tortured recent history of Jaguar, it's Rogers; he's lived it his entire career. He joined the company in 1984, at about the time the former Thatcher government spun off Jag from the old British Leyland, ending what was a marriage made in Hell. Under British Leyland, Jaguar produced embarrassing products with a degree of inefficiency that only 1980s Britain could do.
Heading up Jag back then was Sir John Egan. He set about dressing up this once-wondrous car company by cutting staff and putting lipstick on an aging product line. He did this without investing much in new model development. Along came Ford in 1989, dazzled by Egan's Miss Piggy. Ford became the new owner for about $2.5-billion.
By 1992, Jaguar was again on the brink. Jim Padilla, a manufacturing expert who later became president of Ford Motor, arrived in Great Britain to fix the British marque's moribund manufacturing and engineering operations. They were a mess, he once told me. Assembly line workers would pause to make tea rather than add parts to the cars rolling down the line. There were birds nesting in the roof of the paint shop. They would fly about, leaving their dropping on the in-progress cars below.
"Jaguar was not a cupcake assignment," he said. "It was a turnaround."
Through the mid- and late 1990s, Ford was misguided about what it would take to revive Jag. By 1998, I found myself in the office of then-Jaguar boss Nick Scheele, months before the world got its first look at what would become the S-Type, in October at the British International Motor Show in Birmingham, England.
The late Scheele told me that, within five years, Jaguar planned to quadruple the annual sales volume of about 50,000 units to 200,000. He emphasized the excitement at Jag and Ford. "Remember, many people were closing the doors on us and would never have bet a plugged nickel on the fact that we could come back and hopefully offer full-scale competition to Mercedes and BMW."
Unfortunately, Ford didn't leave Jag to be Jag. Instead, Ford installed Dearborn-like processes in Brown's Lane that brought everything to a crawl. By forcing Jag to be just another Ford brand, and by insisting on mindless cost-savings and a misguided platform-sharing approach, Ford doomed Jaguar's revival. The S-Type shared its underpinnings with the Lincoln LS sedan and that was okay, but the X-Type launched in the early 2000s was a Ford Mondeo under the skin and it was a disaster.
By 2004, Jag was bleeding red ink, saddled with a failed product line and a sketchy future. Ford put finance executive Bibiana (Bibby) Boerio in charge and she was utterly miscast. Ford's mismanagement of Jaguar had become a running joke. Boerio was the fourth Jaguar head since Scheele had moved on to bigger jobs at Ford.
Things worsened until Tata relieved Ford of its pain and Land Rover as well. By my count, Ford spent two decades and $50-billion on its Jaguar venture. Lost treasure, all of it.
Speth is careful in articulating what's in JLR's playbook now, but here's what we know: JLR is in the early stages of a massive product expansion, spending more than $4.5-billion through March 2016, to develop and launch 12 new vehicles, variants or upgrades. Over the next five years, that number will rise to 50.
The JLR playbook sounds reminiscent of Scheele's 17 years ago. Speth, like Scheele before him, concedes that JLR will always be substantially smaller than the big German three, Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The latter each sell nearly 2 million vehicles a year, while JLR's volumes are less than 500,000.
JLR will build on its core strengths – heritage, British-ness and its owners' passion for the product – with cars and Land Rover trucks that are gorgeous, refined, technologically advanced and delightful to drive.
"We have this British origin that is in our DNA – our history, our heritage. And we will continue in that way," says Speth. "That's an element of differentiation to other car companies. It's a lifestyle. Jaguar Land Rover being part of this British lifestyle is one element of differentiation. And the most critical one."
Except, this time around JLR has the funds, the people and expertise to produce the most modern vehicles. Indeed, Speth bristles when I ask if the new XE might suffer the same sad fate of Jaguars under Ford.
The XE is no X-Type, he insists. "We started from scratch, from a clean sheet of paper. That means we didn't take over anything," he says, alluding to the X-Type's Mondeo roots. "We created a new product, a new plant. We have a body which is lighter and stiffer and we have the latest electronic features. We have a chassis which is from a class higher. We have a stunning design.
"Try it. Feel it. It has a new engine. It's our engine, with the lowest CO2 at 99 grams. We have the lowest cost of ownership. The highest residual value. The latest technology. Longer service warranties because we have trust in the vehicle."
fter the XE will come an all-new XF for 2016, along with a compact crossover. An XE coupe and wagon is likely in 2017 and the XJ gets a full remake by 2018. At Land Rover, after the Discovery Sport comes a new Discovery, along with a refreshed Evoque and Range Rover Sport.
All built and produced under the relatively hands-off Indian ownership, with German leadership at the top, that lovely British heritage and passion running right through the brands, and whatever useful bits remain from the Americans, Ford.
"At the end of the day, it's a British Company," says Speth. "It's based in the Midlands. The engineering is done centrally in the Midlands. The lead designers are from the United Kingdom, the Royal College of Art. This creativity – that was all in the U.K., in the Midlands, bringing this together makes us a very attractive company."
Correction: The world got its first look at the Jaguar S-Type and the British International Motor Show and the S-Type shared its underpinnings with the Lincoln LS, not the F-Type, as stated in an earlier version of this story.
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