Upfront
JAGUAR LAND ROVER’S boss, Thierry Bolloré, has walked away from the company, ostensibly “for personal reasons”. Hmm. With him goes his Reimagine plan to reinvent Jaguar as a Bentley-rivalling EV marque, lifting the brand sharply upmarket in the process. It’s always somewhat disorientating when a brand stretches either radically up or downmarket, but the public perception of these two strategies is markedly different. Ford’s second-gen Mondeo was hailed as one of the landmark cars in its class, but when Jaguar rebodied the Mondeo’s bones to create the more affordable X-Type, it was widely derided. It wasn’t that the X-Type was a bad car. Far from it. It just didn’t mesh with what buyers expected from Jaguar. People tend to remember failed down-market brand stretches and associate them with naked opportunism, cynicism and…