Jaguar Type 01 debuts; now, no one remembers the electric Ferrari
The Type 01 is the first model to arrive from Jaguar’s rebirth. The British carmaker was an early entrant to the modern EV market with the 2017 I-Pace, which was fun to drive even if it was too small inside and perhaps completely unreliable. An all-electric sedan was supposed to be next, but a year from the showroom, it was abruptly canceled, leaving the automaker with nothing to sell as old models like the F-Pace ceased production.
“The jag, it looks like a car you’d steal in Cyberpunk 2077,” said one Ars staffer approvingly. Credit: Jaguar
This car at least has a somewhat unique look to it unlike the Luce; which looks so powerfully generic that it almost doesn’t matter what other features it has.
I’m not even sure you can compare the two. To me the have different missions and are appealing to different segaments of (albeit the same) market. The only similarity is they’re both EVs.
I think that’s true for the exterior, but for the interior it’s the opposite, the Luce interior looks great, and the jag interior looks like every other new car…
Kind of ironic given Jags are more well known for driver comfort while Ferraris are more known for showing off.
High end electric cars will not matter until battery technology advances to the point where those cars can compete with internal combustion engines on a power to weight ratio.
What are you talking about? EV’s have been blowing doors on ICE cars on this metric for a while. A $44k MG 4 Xpower has a better power to weight ratio than a $122k Porsche 911, and beats it off the line by .3 seconds.
What I really meant is the total weight of the car.
EVs weight too much for anything other than drag racing. They are way to heavy for turning and even something simple like a speed bump feel like a violent pothole.
We still don’t have an EV that can be as fun to drive as a Miata.
CATL is said to be developing a 12,000 Wh/Kg battery which is about the same as gasoline. That would make a real EV supercar that would rival a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari.
EVs weight too much for anything other than drag racing.
Most production EVs perform pretty well compared to similarly priced vehicles. Nurburgring records, for example, have plenty of electric cars getting sub-8:00 times, including some that cost less than $50k. Not a lot of street legal ICE vehicles you can say that about.
You’re all over the place. Are you talking about performance or price? Porsche has created a track monster in the Taycan Turbo GT, setting impressive times in established tracks (Laguna Seca, Nurburgring), much faster than most ICE supercars. Plus I guess it holds the bizarre title of fastest production 4-door around those tracks (despite having no rear seat), EV or ICE.
But if we’re talking about actual track performance, which you brought up first, there are EVs at the top that can hang with ICE supercars. Yes, they can also drag race. The other stuff you’re saying about “fun” is different (it’s more fun to drive a manual transmission, but at this point manuals are slower), and talk of resale value is entirely different.
There’s some truth to this, and we probably will never have the energy density of batteries that gasoline has, but EV’s do have the advantage of having all their weight in the bottom of the car, so they tend to handle a lot better than you’d expect from the weight. Anything you lose on the corners you make up in the straights.
For example, the Tesla Model S Plaid ($89,990) set a 1:27.78 lap time at Willow Springs (Big Willow), beating the BMW M5 CS ($142,000) at 1:28.76 by 0.98 seconds.
They don’t know what to do with the face. They’re afraid to go big, so they go bland and call it “understated elegance.” The only clue it’s a Jaguar is if you happen to notice the name on the front. At least the Rolls still looks like a Rolls.
Massive A-pillars. I guess if you can blow $150K on a car, you can afford to hit pedestrians.
A Pillars are perfectly capable of hiding whole ass cars, too.
Turning out of my apartment’s driveway and entering the roundabout are two places I am regularly almost creamed thanks to the safety provided by a hefty A Pillar.
These companies mastered a design language and they’ve failed to maintain it in these EVs. You can take a chance with a radical new design, but don’t be surprised if you fall on your face. Slapping jag or Ferrari on it doesn’t make it look good.
Even the new Audi Q2 Etron they are rolling out in 2027 is horrendous. I thought I could trust Audi to make a normal decent looking car, but no. Not any more.
I think the Hyundai Ioniq, the Toyota bZ4X (what an awful name) and the Mazda 6e all look pretty cool. They more or less just look like any other regular ICE car. For some reason the western and Chinese manufacturers keep trying to do something funky and hideous.
They more or less just look like any other regular ICE car.
ice cars are how they are because they basically need to be. I’m an anti car but I’m glad EVs are throwing that shitty design criteria out the window and experimenting.
Chinese cars are how they are because that’s what the biggest car market on the planet wants.
if you want something that is boring and uninspiring, Toyota has your back
I can neither afford nor need one if these but id get one :)
Fair, I’m not a fan of those either but that unfortunately seems to be the case with almost all EVs unfortunately so it’s not like that really matters in this case.
I wouldn’t call them beautiful, but yes they are at least passable (except the older ioniq 6’s- don’t like the looks of them). I mean the best of them like the Mazda simply look like average ICE sedans. But it’s sad to see so many manufacturers with track records of making beautiful cars like Audi, Ferrari, and now Jaguar pumping out completely fugly EV’s. I just don’t get it. This is one area Tesla did pretty well. Pity Elon owns it. The one cheaper EV I actually like the looks of is the Smart #1, specifically the grey and red Brabus edition.
Companies need to make tiered pricing models, they all ditched the intro level car and left us with bloated driving computers. Bring back the basic car with all normal designs and physical knobs
I’m actually pretty impressed with how cheap EV’s are becoming. The ioniq 3 at €28k is a great deal, and Smart just announced their tiny #2 ev at €20k.
No, the Renault R5 is really good looking. The new BMW i3 Neue Klasse is as well and as it happens looks almost identical to the ICE version even though its on a pure electric platform.
The interior is fine, I can appreciate the clean lines and overall minimal ornamentation. White is probably a bad choice for a car that any real human is going to use.
But a touchscreen for the interior controls? Really? Is it 2015 again? Physical buttons are better. I would even go so far as to say they’re necessary for any controls that a driver might operate while driving - they should be findable by feel only, in the dark, while your eyes are on the road. A luxury vehicle design should certainly have physical controls, even if they’re tucked behind one of these panels to preserve the look of the interior:
That thing that looks like a phone bolted onto the center spine is just ugly. It sticks out from the rest of the interior design like a flashing neon sign of cost-cutting. It looks like a POS terminal, like I’m about to pay for my coffee:
What a bad decision, or probably chain of bad decisions made through several committee meetings.
It looks cooler but doesn’t mean it is. My truck has a touch screen for Apple car play but everything else is physical control and I appreciate it so much
Whoever came up with the concept of touchscreens being somehow more sophisticated and luxurious than buttons deserves to be fired. Actually, while you’re at it, fire the guy that thought EVs needed all the useless tech gizmos cramped into them as standard.
Product people are being pushed out of leadership to make room for soulless MBAs. It is happening in every industry now that oligopoly guarantees returns and better products are no longer needed.
Edit: This is the LUXURY market. People buy luxury items not because they are COST EFFECTIVE but because they are AWESOME. Old school luxury car designers (ie product people) would sooner kill themselves than put their names on this bland shit.
I mean the reason they use the screens is more a cost thing.
LG and Samsung are pumping out millions of touch screens a year. The cost for a single screen is less than 100 bucks and it’s off the shelf. The alternative is spinning up or contacting production lines for those buttons or knobs each requiring design and QC and of course production.
Physical things, including buttons and knobs, have to deal with moving parts breaking. Moving parts break in different ways from digital screens, and testing those parts for MTBF is more expensive than for digital screens. Individual buttons and knobs also have to be wired separately instead of a single wiring input to a CPU.
That one is on Apple. Not because they pushed touchscreens as luxurious, but because Apple was generally seen as a luxury brand when people were first switching from phones with buttons to iPhones. The rest is just the general market reaction to a fad, in this case the ultra minimalist fad that also came from Apple.
White is probably a bad choice for a car that any real human is going to use.
It looks more like beige.
I drove an Audi A4 with light grey / silver fabric interior for 15 years. It was 18 years when I sold it and still looked mostly like new. Only the drivers seat had a few slightly darker spots that I could likely have cleaned with a wet-dry vacuum cleaner.
I didn’t have kids in the car during that time, though. But I guess neither would whoever drives Jaguar.
