October 7, 2026 Automotive · Opinion

Jaguar Finally Showed Us the Car. It's Still in the Box.

The production Type 01 has up to 1,015 horsepower, four seats, no rear window and a $130,500 price. Early prototype drives were encouraging. Nobody has road-tested the finished car.

Rear three-quarter view of a silver Jaguar Type 01 with a blank, slatted rear end and no rear window, parked in front of a modern metal-clad building. Image: Jaguar

In December 2024, I compared Jaguar's rebrand to Derelicte, Derek Zoolander's fashion line inspired by the beauty of trash. In March, I softened a little. British reporters who had seen the production car were calling it "striking," and I promised to revise my verdict when the real thing showed up.

It showed up Tuesday night in New York. It's called the Type 01, and it looks like somebody handed an architect the brief for a car.

To be fair to the architect, the numbers are serious. Three electric motors make up to 1,015 horsepower and 1,007 lb-ft of torque. Jaguar says 0 to 60 takes 3.1 seconds and EPA range should reach 400 miles, a figure it calls provisional.

It starts at $130,500. Orders open early next year, and deliveries begin in the second half of 2027.

It has four doors and four seats, and Jaguar calls it a "2+2." That's a term usually reserved for coupes with a back seat fit for groceries. Top Gear's Ollie Kew said he had never heard a carmaker use it on a four-door car, and he called the Type 01 "a space inefficient, selfish car." I'd have that framed and hung in the lobby at Solihull.

The architect was invited

I'm not stretching the comparison. Jaguar's chief designer, Tom Holden, explained the car to Forbes by saying, "The most beautiful houses in the world are never overdone." The company calls its design philosophy "exuberant modernism," which was a school of architecture long before anybody applied it to a sheet of aluminum. The Autopian looked at the result and saw "a brutalist monument."

Buildings are made to be looked at. Cars are made to be looked out of, and the Type 01 doesn't give you much to look out of.

There's no rear window at all. Carscoops described the side glass as "extraordinarily small." From the curb it looks like it's still in the box it came in.

Jaguar is especially proud of something it calls the Impossible Panel, an aluminum body panel its own engineering software said couldn't be made. They made it anyway. I would have taken the software's word for it.

It only looks enormous

People keep asking why it's so big. By the standards of its class, it isn't. At 206 inches, it's shorter than a Rolls-Royce Ghost, a Maybach S-Class and a Bentley Flying Spur. It's about the length of a long-wheelbase Range Rover.

The difference is what happens inside. The Rolls carries four adults like a private club. The Range Rover carries five and a dog.

The Type 01 is limo length with coupe accommodations, and Auto Express puts it at 2.7 tonnes, which is about 6,000 pounds.

Then there's California. Autoblog's Paul Eisenstein reports that California is expected to be the Type 01's biggest market. I live in Southern California, so I'll take that one personally.

Picture a 6,000-pound monolith with no rear window backing out of a Trader Joe's parking lot on a Saturday. I'd pay to watch, from a safe distance.

The bet

Jaguar's managing director, Rawdon Glover, isn't worried about any of this. "If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we'll just get drowned out," he told Fox Business. He has a point. Nobody gets drowned out in this car.

About 50,000 people have registered interest, and Glover told Electrifying that four out of five who left their details have never owned one. The rebrand found somebody new. Jaguar still has to turn an email address into $130,500.

There's no cheaper Jaguar coming behind it, either. Future models move further upmarket, and the company went more than a year with almost nothing to sell while it waited for this one.

Jaguar did let a few journalists drive pre-production prototypes at Gaydon, and the early reports were encouraging. Auto Express called it "shaping up to be an impressive grand tourer" and reserved judgment until it drives the finished car next year. So the chassis people were at least invited to the architect meetings.

In March, I wrote that you can survive a bad rebrand, but you cannot survive a bad car. I still believe that, and the Type 01 doesn't settle it.

The specifications are strong and the prototypes are promising. Nobody has driven the finished car yet, and customers won't get one until late 2027.

I mean, there's probably a car in that box.

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