Jaguar's Best Cars Have Always Looked Like Space Ships And The Type 00 Concept Continues That Legacy

Jaguar unveiled the absolutely wild Type 00 concept during Miami Art Week in December last year, and the reception it received could not have been more polarized. In a world where middle-aged men who should have something better to do turn every little thing into a ridiculous culture war, the all-electric ultra-luxury coupe concept was immediately deemed "woke garbage." Despite the fact that Jaguar is touting the production version of the machine as a near-1000 horsepower, 460-ish-mile range icon of conspicuous consumption, the small-minded weirdos among the car enthusiast world demanded their pound of leaping cat flesh over some perceived slight that never received elucidation. Every single one of you short-sighted losers who ragged on this concept is wrong. Jaguar has a history of polarizing design that looks like nothing else on the road, and the Type 00 is an extension of the legacy created when the XK120 arrived in 1948.

Full Disclosure: Jaguar flew me to Miami, Florida to enjoy the Formula E race as its guest, including food, drinks, and lodging. On Thursday the brand threw a reception featuring the recent Type 00 concept. While DJ Khaled performed nearby, I mulled over the polarizing reception of this car with a spicy margarita in my hand.

Bradley Brownell

Following World War II Jaguar needed to reinvent itself as the pinnacle of engineering and design in the sporting car world. Not only did Jaguar develop the XK120 to look like it flew down out of space to park in your front drive, but it was fast as all heck setting the production-car top-speed record in its day. Can you imagine how it must have felt to see an XK120 in 1948 when you'd just driven off the dealer lot in a Chevrolet Stylemaster? American sedans were all schlubby, bubbly and bulbous, while the Jaguar was svelte and swoopy, utterly extra-terrestrial.   

Fast forward a little to the Mark 1 E-type (above) and you might understand the picture a little better. This car, now considered among the most beautiful driving machines of all time, was introduced in 1961. Its sleek simplicity and unadorned shape was completely unheard of at the time. By 1961 even Ferrari had begun incorporating tail fins into its designs, and the early 250GTs have gills, scoops, eggcrate grilles, and huge swathes of chrome bumper at each end. A 1961 Corvette is a frumpy and uncouth design when juxtaposed with the E-type. While seemingly every other automaker was still stuck with the last vestiges of the rocket age, tacking fins and humps everywhere they don't belong for no reason at all, the E-type looked as if it would levitate off the showroom floor and slip into warp speed with a flash of light.

And that's to say nothing of the ludicrously beautiful XK-SS and D-Type racing car versions of the company's successful road cars. Those wild animals were function over form, but hot damn did the resulting form ever stun. 

Bradley Brownell

We don't have to limit ourselves to the first two decades of post-war Jags to make this point, either. Even in the dire design-bereft 1970s Jaguar was churning out gorgeous, if otherwise fallible, XJ-C pillarless coupes based on the somewhat frumpy but stylistically unmatched XJ6 sedan. The 1980s saw the ludicrously but effortlessly cool XJSC V12 Targa (below). Think of the XJ220 supercar that still looks sleek and modern unlike its Ferrari F40 and Porsche 959 counterparts. Even as the competition caught on to the utterly-spaceship-esque design language of Jaguar and molded it to fit their own vehicles, Jag's XKS and F-Type still stand out as unique and uncompromised design-forward machines.

Here's the thing — what Jaguar was doing before wasn't working. This is the Etch-A-Sketch re-start that the brand needs to re-inject some excitement after a decade of declining sales. In 2024 the brand sold just 33,320 units worldwide, down from 64,241 units in 2023, and it doesn't have the kind of profit built in to those pedestrian mid-size SUVs that a brand like Ferrari or Porsche can command. My takeaway from that is two-fold. First, for everyone who said the Type 00 was the wrong direction for Jag and it should keep doing swoopy sports cars and high-volume SUVs, that clearly wasn't working for the company, and you lot weren't buying them anyway. Second, the Type 00 is exactly the kind of forward-thinking ludicrously anachronistic design that Jaguar has always done. It doesn't look like anything else on the road, because Jags never do. 

Bradley Brownell

Design is the ultimate subjective art. If you don't like the look of the Type 00 I'm not going to try to change your mind. I think this thing looks ace, and spending some time admiring it in person only strengthened my resolve. But aside from all that, it doesn't matter if you like it or not, Jag is doing something nobody else ever could, because that's exactly what Jag has always done.