When Jaguar’s ‘copy nothing’ brand reboot hit late last year, one self-styled car enthusiast replied on X: “What the actual hell is this?” Jaguar’s response: “The future.” That remains to be seen. But the ad, unfamiliar and unsettling, does at least work as a portent of what’s coming for the global vehicle industry.
Jaguar, a storied but struggling British brand owned by India’s Tata Motors, shredded its existing traditions with a 30-second video long on po-faced models but with no sign of an actual car. It all heralded a new direction – high-end electric vehicles – with a concept, the Type 00, revealed in Miami shortly thereafter. If the idea was to draw attention, albeit often apoplectic, it worked. Even Elon Musk reacted.It’s a time for radical moves in the vehicle industry. Just before the Type 00 unveiling, news broke that both Stellantis NV’s chief executive and Nissan Motor’s finance chief were abruptly departing. A few weeks before, Volkswagen had announced the seemingly unthinkable: closing plants in Germany (it later agreed with unions to keep them open but reduce capacity). A little earlier, Ford Motor touted what felt like its millionth pivot on EVs. Not to be outdone, General Motors ended last year with a trifecta: a $US5 billion ($8 billion) write-down in China, the sale of its stake in a US battery factory project, and the sudden closure of its in-house robotaxi arm, Cruise.In an echo of how China upended the solar panel industry, it has built a staggering amount of vehicle manufacturing capacity, enough to make more than 50 million passenger vehicles, of all types, a year.That is roughly double domestic demand and enough to satisfy more than half of the global market. Foreign manufacturers who enjoyed growth and profits from China through joint ventures for decades have seen those collapse, as GM’s write-down illustrates. Chinese exports shot up to 6 million vehicles last year, overtaking Japa
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