You've got to feel sorry for the Brits. Once home to some of the world's best– er, most charismatic vehicles, the country has seen their automotive crown jewels sold off to Johnny Foreigner and/or fade into the mists of time. With the disappearence of the once-proud MG Rover Group, it's no wonder that British automotive analyst Michael Wynn-Williams doesn't like the idea of Ford selling off Jaguar and Land Rover. In a recent white paper "Jaguar’s part in rescuing Ford," Trend Tracker's trend tracker said "Whoa! Slow down there Billy Boy! Why sell the family silver when you may want to throw a dinner party or two when things settle down a bit." OK, I'm paraphrasing. But Wynn-Williams' main point is there for the taking. So, I called-up WW and took it like a man.
Find Reviews by Make:
Read all comments
Senile and pace, Great line.
Crazy American car companies. It was only a matter of time before stock price, and customer sentiment drove them to a state of mind where “We’ve got to kill the children, before it’s too late!” becomes the only option that seems to make sense.
I sure hope Ford holds onto these, but at this point, I can’t see it. Jaguar could be so much, but has been reduced by uninspired design and a quality-control reputation that is horrible, even if no longer true.
When Ford lets them go, whoever buys them will most likely invest some money and have some great vehicles on their hands. This is purely a case of total mismanagement and it seems they almost found joy in trashing Jaguar and Land Rover.
In the end do these multi-brand manufacturers work anymore? The cars are too different – Ford – Lincoln – Volvo – Mazda – Jaguar? Toyota has it down cheap Toyotas – Scion, Toyota and expensive Toyotas – Lexus. Will Volvo become an independent company (or find another owner) after Ford’s first filing? Will someone buy Saab? Who wants Land Rover? Would these brands have been better without the insight of Detroit? Maybe some would have died earlier, but is being passed around worse?
After Saab, Land Rover and Jaguar are unloaded- those cars are going to see some amazing depreciation. Can’t wait to see the difference between the Ford Jaguar and Huyndai-owned Jaguar.
I think this guy not only nails the problems of Jaguar, but also gives the reason for the demise of GM, Ford & Co.
The Problem for Chevy or Ford is that their mid-range vehicles are just no longer mainstream.
You know, back in the 50s and 60s, everybody wanted to be average: Have an average job at your average office with average payment, move to an average home in an average suburb and have an average car from one of the Big Three.
Today it’s more about individualism. Well, not really, but at least people think they are special, even though they are as mainstream as ever. Anyway, no matter if it’s true individualism or just felt individualism, it leads to the same end: People just don’t want mid-range, middle class, average products any more.
People either buy very cheap or very luxurious, depending on how important they think the given product is. (Eg. most people buy their their food at the cheapest groceries store out there, while others only eat foor that they get from their eco-friendly farmer of choice – the same is true with cars)
Millionaires buy at 1$-shops and Wal-Mart, while your average middle class guy drives a Mercedes.
People who think cars are important won’t drive anything worse than an Acura, either because they are piston heads or because of the status the given car gives you.
Others just don’t give a damn about cars and especially not about status. They just want a practical car, that doesn’t break down, that doesn’t need a lot of fuel and that has to be as cheap as possible. Those people would probably never even consider anything beyond a Honda Fit.
Both groups of people would hardly ever buy a Chevy or Ford car. There’s no room for mid-range. It’s either cheap or luxury. That’s the ironic part: The Big Three cars are perceived as mainstream when in reality they are a minority.
It’s hard to get out of this dilemma and in any way it’ll take a long time and a lot of money. But what the Big Three need is cars that are mainstream but pretend to be special, cars that are not mid-range but either small eco-boxes or big motherf******. DCX is on a good track with the Caliber on the one hand and the 300 on the other. Both are mainstream cars, but both are good at hiding it.
Sorry if my comment wasn’t entirely on topic but it had to be said :)
Wow, tom, that was awesome. That is exactly the point I was trying to make in the discussion about the future of cars a few days back. A good counter point to yours and mine is Subaru. They really are a mid-range car company, and their sales are on the way up. How does Subaru fit in, in your opinion?
Subaru is individualism at its best. They manufacture their own quirky cars with frameless doors, boxer engines, AWD and bizzare styling.
They hide their mainstream cars very well. There is nothing mainstream about the Impreza or the Legacy. You cannot sit down and realistically compare them to any ford/honda/toyota products.
Ford’s had plenty of time to turn around Jaguar; after billions of dollars and nearly a decade it hasn’t happened. Jag’s gotta go, the “Way Forward” requires less overhead and more cash flow.
As long as JTR in California is still swapping Chevy 350’s into Jaguars then Ford probably still has a problem with reliability.
Subaru also makes some very interesting cars to folks who like performance and don’t want to pay for European manufacturing costs. The WRX and Legacy GT give AWD and hig performance engines at prices that are 10-20K below those of comparable vehicles from BMW and Audi. And some of their offerings are even nearly sensible for performance AND utility like the WRX wagon. Same size and a little more power than the BMW 325ix wagon or the Audi A4 Avant, but again $10K less – and probably even more dependible.
What’s surprising about Subaru is that more folks haven’t discovered them.
A lot of people seem to be placing the whole blame for Jaguar’s failre on Ford. I don’t think Ford deserves so much blaming. It seems like what happened is that Ford tried to bite off more than they could chew. I don’t know if they were even profitable, but before the American takeover, Jaguar was just a niche player. Their model range usually included a premium salon that competed with the top versions of S-class, a coupe/roadster based on same thing, and an occassional supercar.
Ford decided to make Jaguar into a full-fledged luxury brand that competes with M-B, BMW, and Lexus in all segments. This was a very bold move. If executed well, the payoff could be comparable to the payoffs of the Japanese vendors who created their luxury divisions from scratch. Ford certainly had the money and the technology to do it, but somehow something didn’t go well. Perhaps they didn’t invest enough to make it happen or perhaps it was a marketing failure. Yes, they did something wrong along the way but do recognize that turning Jaguar into a mainstream luxury brand was a huge gamble and undertaking for Ford. The way things stand now, Jaguar seems to have a great model lineup with even more cars coming soon but the economies of scale are keeping them in red, and Ford doesn’t want to continue sinking billions of dollars into such a risky project. Perhaps, it would make sense to keep Jaguar if Ford didn’t also own another global luxury brand: Volvo.
It’s also naive to believe that Jaguar could survive as an independent brand. The economies of scale in the car industry are such that it seems like even brands like Volvo and Saab are too small to survive on their own. Some technologies had become prohibitively too expensive to obtain. For example, Saab can’t afford to invest the same amount of money into designing 9-3 as BMW in 3-series because BMW can resonably expect to sell 250K 3-series bimmers/year while Saab will sell 50K 9-3s/year tops.
Porsche seems to stand as the only counter-argument to my theory. Perhaps, they’re being run by geniouses or something. It happens. If that’s true, then expect something surprising to happen once they take over VW.
“Porsche seems to stand as the only counter-argument to my theory. Perhaps, they’re being run by geniouses or something. It happens. If that’s true, then expect something surprising to happen once they take over VW.”
jacob,
If by ‘surprising’ you mean that niceties you take for granted on even a mid-line Jetta will suddenly become not only options, but really expensive options, then you have nailed the Porsche profit recipe pretty durn well.
Saunter down to the local P dealer and check out what doesn’t come on 911 variants. Then see what it costs to get what most buyers consider ‘essentials’ in this class added to your purchase.
Ford’s outside purchases made no sense at the time they were made. It was almost inconceivable that it would end up any other way.
Semi-off topic – I sometimes wonder what would have happened had Chrysler gotten Lamborghini for the second time. It would have been (essentially) in German hands either way, and Audi has done a great job beefing up quality (of course, like Jaguar, it had nowhere to go but up).
I do give Audi a certain level of ‘props’ for realizing that they didn’t want Chrysler to have that asset again. And I do still kinda resent that Lambo shafted Chrysler on the deal at the 11th hour.
Back on topic, though Ford was attempting to turn niche Jaguar into volume Jaguar, why couldn’t they have executed at least as well as Audi did with Lambo?
Hey, no brand is better than it’s (available) service. I can’t remember seeing any Jaguar service shops here in Sweden. Planning to get a Jag, I must consider the risk of leaving the car at a Ford dealer. Someone I know could see me at the service desk.
I think Jacob is right; Jaguar were a niche player who could command a premium because they were exclusive. Saying Ford has another luxury brand in Volvo is part of the problem … Jaguar should never be in the same league as Volvo (Volvo=semi-upmarket, Jaguar=very-exclusive). The fact that Jaguar has ten year product cycles and their new cars look very much like their old ones has eroded their desirability, and hence the premium they can command, because no-one can tell how old your Jag is.
Also moving downmarket with the X and S types has removed any marketability of the “I own a Jag” catchphrase. BMW can exist across this whole market space because they sell luxury-sports cars that people buy to drive. But Jaguar sells sporty-luxury cars that people (used to) buy because they could.
What really made Jaguar special, back in the 1950s and ’60s, were two things: (1) they made a true sports car (as opposed to a drop top coupe whose makers call it a sports car) and (2) they raced and won: four times as I recall, as the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Here in the States, Bob Tullius and his Group 44 team kept Jaguar as a racing presence, into the 1980s.
Those things kept Jaguar as evocative of excitement and joi de vie (sic) even for people who couldn’t afford to actually own one, only wish for one. The E-type was a car dreams were made of. It’s the same thing that has helped Porsche weather bad times. (Admittedly, their wretched SUVs make them money; but it is not the same thing as saying they make the company’s reputation.)
Jaguar should build the F-type two seater as soon as they can. It would be good also, if they could find some privateers to campaign the car in SCCA or other racing series. If Ford interfers with that, Jaguar management should take it upon themselves to find someone to get the disentangled from Ford.
Two corrections to last post: should be “at the 24 Hours of Le Mans..” and “get them disentangled from Ford.”
From Mr. Wynn-Williams:
Thanks for putting up the podcast interview. People tell me it is very good, although I am far too bashful to listen to it myself. This is particularly because your challenging questions put me on the spot rather and I may not have expressed myself fully.
One point that I did want to elaborate on concerns the difficulty in selling a business unit that is interwoven with the rest of the corporation. There seems to be this belief that the greater the platform sharing the harder it is to find a buyer. There is no truth in this, for two reasons. The first is that this would simply be priced into the deal, so if it were an obstacle to the sale then Jaguar would sell for a lower price but it would not take any longer to sell. The other reason why it is not a problem is because, quite frankly, it is a positive advantage.
Selling Jaguar to, say, Proton would mean that in the medium term Proton would effectively be in a joint venture with Ford. The sharing of platforms and component procurement with Ford is just the kind of deal Proton would give their eye teeth for. This would then give Proton a good five years in which to sort themselves out with their own range of Jaguars.
Lets have a look at two examples. Nanjing bought MG Rover, ripped out the factory and took it all to China; a clean, surgical cut, you might think. Except that now they have a range of ageing designs they know nothing about, just what they can copy, and a pressing need to bring them up to date by, well, sometime tomorrow actually. If only they had maintained MG Rover as it was for a few years they could have segued the British operations with the Chinese over a manageable period.
The other example concerns Ford themselves. When the company bought Volvo the Swedes were in the midst of a joint venture with Mitsubishi. In fact, the fruits of this partnership (S/V40) have only just run out. In the interim Ford had plenty of time to decide how they would take the range forward.
So, the degree of platform sharing is irrelevant, it may even be beneficial, it just depends on how the deal is configured.
I am sure you had me lost for words on other questions too but I will only know if I listen to the dreaded podcast!
All the best,
Michael
How could ford succeed with Jag when it trashed it’s own luxury division lincoln. Lincoln clawed itself to number one in the early 90′ s in high dollar sales units in the us. Knocking off cadillac gave them the title when lexus bmw & benz weren’t the 200,000 unit scale players they are today. So 200,000 lincolns won the race back then. Did ford reinvest in lincoln for the future? Did their redesigns making a torpedo shape town car out of a box shape win them awards? did the tarus based continental ever get traction? Finally did the LS deliver on it’s promise? If any one or two of these questions could have been answered in the affirmative, lincoln could still be a player in the american luxury game. So to sum up: If you don’t understand upscale cars here in the US how are you going to mount the world stage with Jaguar?
Jaguar needs a compelling model to match its compelling price point. And the LAST thing a person should consider is reliability on a $60k car, but unfortunately, it should be among the FIRST concern of a buyer. Finally, poor resale makes for an equally poor buying decision. When I see a Jag on the road, I try to glimpse the driver..I’m just curious is all.
Jaguar has enough history in its badge to give it hope for a renaissance. I just have no confidence in the people manning the controls today. Sell it to someone who knows how to build a premium car, and all that goes along with THAT.
i like mw-w – he came across very well. maybe he can be your uk correspondent, bobby?
Ford decided to make Jaguar into a full-fledged luxury brand that competes with M-B, BMW, and Lexus in all segments. This was a very bold move. If executed well, the payoff could be comparable to the payoffs of the Japanese vendors who created their luxury divisions from scratch.
Ford certainly had the money and the technology to do it, but somehow something didn’t go well. Perhaps they didn’t invest enough to make it happen or perhaps it was a marketing failure. Yes, they did something wrong along the way but do recognize that turning Jaguar into a mainstream luxury brand was a huge gamble and undertaking for Ford.
The way things stand now, Jaguar seems to have a great model lineup with even more cars coming soon but the economies of scale are keeping them in red, and Ford doesn’t want to continue sinking billions of dollars into such a risky project. Perhaps, it would make sense to keep Jaguar if Ford didn’t also own another global luxury brand: Volvo.
It’s also naive to believe that Jaguar could survive as an independent brand. The economies of scale in the car industry are such that it seems like even brands like Volvo and Saab are too small to survive on their own. Some technologies had become prohibitively too expensive to obtain. For example, Saab can’t afford to invest the same amount of money into designing 9-3 as BMW in 3-series because BMW can resonably expect to sell 250K 3-series bimmers/year while Saab will sell 50K 9-3s/year tops.
Porsche seems to stand as the only counter-argument to my theory. Perhaps, they’re being run by geniouses or something. It happens. If that’s true, then expect something surprising to happen once they take over VW.
1. I don’t see it as a bold move, but as the only move (Porsche back then was almost dead, and only MB and BMW could have been considered succes stories). Besides, Ford has tried for quite a while to buy BMW.
2. While Ford’s idea was good, the execution was bad. The X-Type udearneath an european Mondeo, S Type a Lincoln.
FWD V6 Jaguar ?!
Destined to fail.
And they were always late (diesels, AWD, wagons, no hatchbacks, no SUVs).
3. Stop with Lexus non-sense, outside the USA they’re not_on_the_radar
for most markets. Besides they were in the 1990s by SUVs witch until recentily represented way over 50% of their sales. No since up to date Jag doesn’t have SUVs, the Lexus comparison doesn’t work.
4. The E46 3er sold at its peak over 560K units per year. Worst was over 400 K units per year. Sales figures between 200k and 250k are for the 5 series.
5. Volvo was the only one making profits, to let it go would be stupid.
6. Porsche are Porsche. The thing if margins are right and you partners you can survive.
For that matter, BMW themselves don’t have right number to be alive in theory.