Alleged Jaguar

So artist's renderings of what is allegedly the all-new Jaguar EV have leaked.

It looks like an unlicensed Barbie Cullinan trying to dodge a trade dress lawsuit from Rolls Royce.

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Postings...

• Super badass twin turbo V-8 ragtop Benz.


• Resurrecting a camera.

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Automotif DLXX...

These straight-out-of-camera monochrome JPEGs of a droptop BMW M4 make it look pretty butch, I think. Shot with the Nikon D800.

Point, Counterpoint...

Jaguar's rebrand has run afoul of the culture wars, with Fox News calling it "Bud Light 2.0" which is kinda funny. I'm sorry, but the average Fox News viewer is going to boycott the new Jaguar for the same reason I am: Aren't neither of us the target demographic for the new over-$100k Jag EV.

The most sensible "con" take I've yet run across has been from Mr Jalco, a graphic designer, illustrator, and sometime auto writer and YouTuber:

Now, before we dive too deep, there are two things we need to establish. Firstly, I love Jaguar. I think they’ve made some of the most beautiful and iconic cars of the 20th century, and the potential offered by their brand and racing heritage is beaten only by Ferrari or Porsche. Secondly, I am absolutely not talking about their yet to be revealed new cars here. I haven’t seen them – hardly anyone outside the internal team has – so cannot and will not judge them. This is purely about the brand ident they have so far released, what it tells us about their direction of travel as a company and the quality of the creative thinking inside the company.

It's an excellent deep dive that explains "brands", "branding", and the uphill row Jag has to hoe to reposition itself in the market, to mix my metaphors as thoroughly as Jaguar has mixed the cases in its typography.

On the "pro" side of the ledger is this well-argued piece by Alex Goy at Driven:

As well as dragging some of the worst of humanity out of the woodwork, it also brought out a group of concerned Jaguar fans. For them, Jaguar’s been doing broadly the same thing since before they were born. The brand’s heritage, even post Ian Callum reinvention, has been the steadfast hook upon which Jaguar’s hat swung. Images of the E-Type (which has been out of production for nearly 50 years) are everywhere, and rightly so, the Morse (which hasn’t been on our screens for nearly 25 years) Mk II is used as a shining example of how great Jag used to be. The tales of derring do, of record breaking, of Le Mans, Geneva, and the Mille Miglia are staggering, and they hold a special place in a lot of hearts.

Keeping things the same as they’ve always been leads to two problems. Firstly, a lot of people want to let others buy new, and then snap ‘em up in 15 years time for £1,500 - which won’t help Jag now. Far from it. In 2023 Jaguar sold 64,241 cars. To put this into perspective - over 75 million cars were sold globally in 2023. Porsche shifted in excess of 320,200, BMW’s M division flogged over 200,000, and Genesis put over 150,000 new cars in homes during the same year. Lots of people are saying they want the old Jag, but the numbers show they didn’t want to pay for it.

Of course, the car hasn't even been revealed yet, and we're all talking out of our fourth point of contact until sales figures start coming in, but if the purpose of advertising is to get people talking about you, the new ad campaign has succeeded at that.

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Automotif DLXIX...

A couple of newlyweds having a grand old time waving from the back seat of a Sandshell Beige 1962 Ford Thunderbird last weekend. The photo was snapped with a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

It's only lightly cropped from the full 16MP resolution, so it should embiggenate nicely.

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Sign of the Times

Jaguar apparently shopped around for a new logo and the one they bought was, um... questionable. It's vague, communicates nothing, and sticking a capital "G" in the middle of a bunch of lower case letters is a crime against typography.

Designer: “What are your company’s core virtues and strengths?”

Jaguar: “Tradition. Luxury. Excellence. High performance…”

Designer: “Cool. Here’s a logo fit for a Spice Girls cover band.”

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Written Elsewhere...

• My 200th post at Cars Gone By: A 1966 Mustang GT convertible.


• On the reasons behind the enduring popularity of the 1911.


• The U-Shaped Utility Curve of All the Things.

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Automotif DLXVIII...

This 1970 Chevelle SS looks like it's down to party. It sounds like it, too.

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Link Stuff...

• Early '00s Aston Martins were such good looking cars.


• Writing with style!


• Motorcycle roadtrip through Vietnam...

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Automotif DLXVII..

Any E-body sighting in the wild these days is kind of a big deal to me, and spotting a 1970 Challenger RT in Lime Light with a 440 Six Pack is a very big deal indeed.

Tasty.

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Automotif DLXVI...

Continuing the second generation F-body theme from yesterday is this late Seventies Z28. The hood is an '80 or '81, the fender vents say '77-'79, the grille is '78-'80. The air dam and fender flares didn't come alont until '79, so if I were to hazard a guess, it's a '79 with a functional '80-'81 cowl induction hood rather than the original hood that came with a dummy non-functional NACA duct.

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Automotif DLXV...

A 1979 Pontiac Trans Am in Sundance Yellow, the last year for the 400... although the "6.6 LITRE" decal on the shaker scoop says this one's actually an Oldsmobile 403.  

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Elsewhere...

• Shooting a Triumph TR-3A in action with a Nikon D800 in color and B&W...


• A '66 Impala Sport Coupe with a rat rod vibe.

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Automotif DLXIV...

Initially I thought this might be the Mercury Monterey I saw in the Broad Ripple Kroger parking lot back in 2017, but examining the photos, it sure doesn't appear to be.

This one has a single exhaust and is a faded Silver Turquoise Iridescent, while the other is Peacock and has dual exhausts. Also, the side mirrors are different.

Wild to think that there might be two of them in the area.

Automotif DLXIII...

You don't see a '62 Corvette out just tooling around every day, that's for sure.

Spotted this one at lunchtime on Saturday, rolling through SoBro and enjoying the sunny, temperate early autumn weather before we turn the heat on again for the week.

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Hot Rods of Summer

This past summer has been an unusually good one for classic hot rods.

Hard Night at the Office

I dreamed I was selling cars again, which was weird, because it's been thirty-five years since I worked at a car dealership.

In the dream the dealership didn't have a showroom, but rather a big open-plan office with low-walled cubicles. I had this young just-married couple looking to buy a car and they very specifically wanted a manual transmission. We test drove something like a mid-Eighties Camry with a four-cylinder and a five speed, and some imaginary dream coupe that looked something like an MX-6 but was made by some imaginary French company that only existed in my dream world.

I got off into some interminable nerdy explanation to them about the synchros, and then about the differences between straight-cut and helical-cut gears, using a couple file folders to mime how the gear teeth meshed.

There were hundreds of cars on the lot but only three had manual transmissions and I was trying to find the third one in the computer, but we hot-desked in these little cubicles and whoever had used this one last had played a browser game that left always-on-top pop-up windows all over the desktop, obscuring our sales software.

I was trying to explain to the dude, who was the one insisting on a manual, that there was no real performance advantage to a manual and it would make for a more tedious commute in traffic, but then I woke up.

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Smoothbrains at Threads...

"Not a sports car any stretch of the definition"?

What kind of pig-ignorant mouth noise is that?

It is the definitional example. The MG-TC is the type specimen of sports cars. All other sports cars are shadows cast on the cave wall by the TC.

That's the sportsest sports car that ever sportsed!

To this day I remember the time I parked my Porsche 924S next to an original gangsta TC in the parking lot of the Blockbuster in Midtown ATL and just sat there and swooned over it until the owner came out.

Hand to God, he had stringback gloves. A flat cap, too. Dude had the Official MG-TC Uniform!

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Dead Wagon

The US auto market has essentially given up on station wagons for whatever reason.

Take, as Exhibit A, the 2018-2020 Buick Regal TourX wagon, based on the Opel Insignia Country Tourer.

I can't believe that Buick released a longroof with AWD and the 250 horsepower turbo four from the base Camaro, and it put down performance numbers basically identical to my '94 Mustang GT & '98 Z3 2.8, plus it looked really good, and the market shrugged and said "Whaddaya got in a blobby crossover SUV instead?"

Heck, Buick didn't just give up the Regal wagon, they gave up all the Regals...and actually all the cars. Buick is solely a purveyor of SUVs and crossovers now.

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Automotif DLXII...

1965 saw the debut of an all-new Galaxie at Ford. It had much more sharply-creased styling and vertically-stacked quad headlights.

It was available as a two-door coupe or convertible, as well as pillared or hardtop sedan, with each version coming in several levels of trim. In 1965 you could get your Galaxie 500 converible in either the regular flavor or the more bling-y Galaxie 500 XL form. The badges on the rear fenders of this '65 ragtop in Vintage Burgundy tell us it's an XL.

The base motor in an XL convertible was the then-new 289 2-barrel small block V-8, called the "Challenger" in Ford ad copy and rated at 200 SAE gross horsepower. The next step up was the 250-horsepower 4-barrel Thunderbird 352 cubic inch FE big block V-8. Power-hungry buyers could opt for the 300 horsepower 390 or the 425 horse 427 "side-oiler" big block.

The smaller two engines only came with the 3-speed Cruise-O-Matic slushbox, while the 390 could be had with an auto or a four-on-the-floor, and the hairy 7 Liter only came with the manual.

While the car magazines of the time all focused on the wild-eyed 427 monsters, the majority of Galaxie XL ragtops had the base motor or, like this one, the 352 FE mill.

This one was photographed with a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and an EF 28-70mm f/2.8L zoom lens in July of 2022.