PARIS MOTOR SHOW: Jaguar small car not yet approved

A Jaguar compact car won’t be launched any earlier than 2015, and a much-mooted all-wheel drive cross-over is even further out.

That’s the message from inside the ambitious British-based Indian-owned sport and luxury car company, which is examining entering these and other market segment in its quest to more than double volume to approximately 200,000 sales per annum in the next few years.

In an exclusive interview with motoring.com.au at the Paris motor show, global product marketing director Steven de Ploey confirmed Jaguar officially signs off new cars for production 30 months before they hit showrooms, something still yet to happen for the X-Type replacement codenamed X760.

“We have not passed that point,” he said. “We are studying, but nothing is currently confirmed. That is the honest, true answer. We have nothing written up on that one.”

Do the maths and that means a sign-off right now sets X760 for an early 2015 launch – at best.

Mr de Ploey said research into a Jaguar 3 series/C-class rival had initially been driven by increasingly stringent global fuel consumption/emissions standards, but the regulatory emphasis on vehicle footprint (USA) and weight (Europe) – the latter a direction China is also said to be moving in – rather than a flat fuel consumption rate, had switched the emphasis to establishing if there was consumer interest in such a car.

“Small car is now much more in the light of where the consumer trends are going,” he explained. “So it has moved from a thought that was more a compliance-driven story to a competitiveness-driven story, because especially in the mature markets with increasing cost of ownership pressure there is a real pressure to downsize (in the premium market).”

The mass/footprint emphasis of future consumption regulations had forced Jaguar and sibling Land Rover to focus on improving the consumption and emissions of current larger vehicles, Mr de Ploey said.

“Our first priority is to make the existing vehicles more fuel efficient rather than jumping into the small cars in order to compensate for the larger cars wherever there is such a need. So all the work today is going into making sure these big cars are state of the art in terms of fuel efficiency. That is why you heard about the diesel hybrid (from Range Rover) and on the Jaguar side why there is significantly lower CO2 with the diesels and the new petrol engines. So that is the primary focal point.”

Mr de Ploey said the crossover was the subject of debate and discussion internally and with sibling Land Rover about where such a vehicle would sit.

“We are going to come closer together obviously with these vehicles [crossovers], but even there we are making sure the DNA of the brands is sufficiently apart from each other so in the eyes of the customer there is sufficient differentiation and distinction to avoid massive cannibalisation between the two.

“The Range Rover or Land Rover will definitely have a superior off-road ability to the Jaguar, but we haven’t made the final call on what a crossover Jaguar should be and what off-road capability it should have. But it is a no-brainer that the Jaguar... should be a car that delivers more on-road and have some soft-road all-weather capability.”

Mr de Ploey revealed Jaguar was about to commence a three month program to investigate new vehicle concepts that should result in a 10-year new model plan being pitched to the board before year’s end. Underpinning much of this new model activity, be it all-new cars or generational overhauls, will be a new aluminium architecture that is highly scalable and modular. The first vehicle to use it was the new Range Rover, but it is so flexible that almost all future JLR products will employ it, although price-capped models such as compact car would probably have to use a higher steel content than larger cars.

Mr de Ploey said more detail of the new architecture, which he described as a toolkit of engines, transmissions, suspensions and other components, would emerge within 12 months, although he would not explain the reason behind the timing. He predicted the architecture strategy would be in place by 2017, with a number of derivatives splitting off the one architecture.

“Toward the future as that toolkit becomes more modular it expands the possibilities to share across the board any of those things that are in there, which is our duty of course with the limited scale that we have got,” he said.

The bottom line for Jaguar in all this is to grow from a niche player to being globally significant. What that exactly means it won’t quantify. But it certainly far exceeds the 60,000-plus sales it will record this year and the 100,000 which is its record. Mr de Ploey said Porsche’s sales ambitions of 200,000 per annum (by 2018) were in the vicinity of where Jaguar wanted to be.

“You know Porsche’s future aspirations, that’s probably closer to truth,” he said.

Read more Paris Motor Show stories at motoring.com.au

See all the photos from the Paris Motor Show at motoring.com.au

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