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NEWS
Steady course for Jaguar design
In the post-retro styling era at Jaguar Ian Callum aims to please and impress buyers, not startle, shock or offendThe Jaguar C-X17 that made its debut last week in Frankfurt has to be gauged a success.
A car that looks like it could roll off a production line tomorrow, it was warmly received at the German show for both its svelte lines and the fidelity of its corporate design. C-X17 could hardly be anything other than a Jaguar.
Present at the show for the unveiling, motoring.com.au spoke at length with the man ultimately responsible for the C-X17's style – Jaguar Design Director Ian Callum.
Callum, a Scot who has worked for HSV and Ford Australia in the past (the EA26 Falcon project being one specifically mentioned during the interview), says he has learned to embrace the thought of Jaguar building a crossover SUV.
"If you'd asked me five years ago, I'd have said no. But I can change with the world too. I know the world wants this..." he explained, in the context of the show car entering production.
As was established in an interview with Jaguar's global brand director, Adrian Hallmark, the show car requires very little fettling to migrate from concept to production reality. According to Callum, pictured here alongside the F-TYPE convertible, this was the plan all along. And that's not necessarily just because the amorphous management team at Jaguar wanted to present an SUV concept that would be a foregone conclusion for production, but because it's in Callum's no-nonsense nature to develop show cars that can be a practical, functioning reality as a matter of course.
"It's a concept based on reality..." the styling chief said of the C-X17. "There's no point designing something purely conceptual without any foundation, because it's not worth anything. It's like building a paper house; there's no point.
"It's based on the architecture that [vehicle line director Kevin Stride's] team is developing; it's a flexible architecture so we can start to move wheelbases and components around to suit the proportions of the car, which we've done. And unto that end it's pretty well feasible. There are no mysteries about it; the package of it is very real – and that's usually the biggest issue.
"With the amount of experience we've got in stamping aluminium we know that most of these panels... we can make, due to the experience we've got at Jaguar, which is probably the best in the world.
"From that point of view it's a very feasible car."
Callum is very much a pragmatist when it comes to developing a new Jaguar – as the C-X17 demonstrates. His view of how a car should evolve over the course of designing it is based on a template comprising various inputs – some of which are fixed and immutable, but others allow a high degree of flexibility.
"To me, design is a series of inputs to create something from them. These inputs may be negotiable, some of them may not be negotiable. The safety of a car is not negotiable, the cost of the car is not negotiable – to a point – the size of people [is] not negotiable. These are givens; we have to deal with them."
One of the inputs that seems to be both immutable and flexible at the same time is the overall Jaguar family look. There is some latitude available in stretching it and kneading it here and there – so it doesn't end up being identical across every model in the range, as is the case with Audi. But Callum understands the need to keep some identity in common across the range, for the sake of building the brand... and it's a task of particular significance at Jaguar.
"We're not going to revolutionise our design language at the moment, because our main objective is to get numbers out there [so] people start to recognise the Jaguar brand..." he expounded.
Callum was pleased to hear that XF is selling well in Australia and remarked that it and the XJ are "everywhere" in the UK, but the Jaguar brand around the rest of the world is "still an unknown quantity." That prompts him to conclude that "this is not the right time to reinvent the face of Jaguar."
As for doing something radical and extreme further down the track, as Chris Bangle did while employed at BMW, Callum indicates that won't happen while he's at the helm of Jaguar design.
"My design philosophy is different from Chris's. Chris enjoyed – surprisingly – shocking people.
"He loved the idea of really challenging the status quo. I've challenged the status quo; it's called: changing Jaguar from where it was to where it is today.
"I feel I need to establish that now, and make sure it continues.
"Good design is not necessarily different design... and different design is not necessarily good.
"I think it's important to make it interesting, beautiful, exciting. That's more difficult than just being different."
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Written byKen Gratton
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