Jaguar’s design chief drops the pencil: is the ship sinking, or is the rottweiler simply walking away?
Gerry McGovern is setting up a consultancy. A polite way of saying the man who turned Range Rover from a farm tool into a luxury statement has chosen to step aside just as Jaguar prepares its all electric reinvention.
Jaguar Land Rover confirmed that its creative heartbeat will walk out at the end of March. Only in December, corporate spokespeople swore blind that talk of McGovern’s departure was malicious gossip. It turns out it was not gossip at all, just the truth waiting for a little fine tuning, rather like the suspension on the latest Defender.
The man who sold you a lifestyle, not a car
McGovern was never just a designer. He persuaded the world that paying a six figure sum for a car that would never leave tarmac made perfect sense. When he joined in 2004, he went on to shape the Range Rover Evoque, a car so successful that even buyers with only the vaguest idea of what sat under the bonnet wanted one.
Under his watch came the reborn Defender, the Velar, and the vast Range Rovers that now fill driveways from west London to the wealthier corners of Tallinn. He turned design into JLR’s only consistently reliable selling point. When the engineering faltered, the cars still looked like a million dollars in the showroom.
Jaguar’s rebirth, an electric fashion statement
McGovern’s final act was Jaguar’s new identity, along with the Type 00 concept. This was the pink, sharply creased machine presented as the brand’s future messiah. Critics saw something closer to an expensive art project, a way of disguising the uncomfortable reality that Jaguar still struggles to define its electric audience.
McGovern tried to sell the idea of electric haute couture. Now he exits the stage just as the moment comes to take a bow.
Timing worthy of an Oscar
Jaguar’s first new electric GT, priced north of £100,000 (about €117,000), is waiting in the wings. It promises range figures that sound almost lunar. And this is precisely when McGovern decides it is time to launch a consultancy. It feels like a film director leaving the set just as the lead actor opens their mouth for the first line.
The numbers do little to calm the nerves. The latest quarterly report reads like a script from a horror film. Revenue fell, sales slipped, and margins dropped to minus 6.8 percent. JLR points to cyberattacks and market turbulence, but McGovern is too experienced not to recognise the mood. Better to leave under the triumphal arch while the champagne still flows than linger until someone starts sweeping up the glass.
Will the new Jaguar rise from the ashes without its chief architect? Possibly. For now, it looks as though McGovern was the only one who noticed the lights had gone out, and chose to leave before anyone reached for a match.
