It's a Hell of a good question. Strangely, few Western media outlets have tackled it. While TTAC's take is forthcoming, The Liverpool Daily Post's Alastair Houghton casts his beady eye on Tata's prospects with the damaged British brand. It may be painful for Jag fans to reconsider the fate of the ill-fated X-Type and re-scan the arterial spray or red ink dogging the cat, but they'll be heartened to read Houghton's historical analysis of the Indian conglomerate's success with other British concerns. The story surrounding Tata's entry into the steel market is especially resonant. “Do you mean to say Tata proposes to make steel rails to British specifications?" Frederick Upcott, Chief Commissioner for Indian Railways reportedly remarked at the turn of the last century. "Why, I’ll eat every pound of steel rail they succeed in making.” Last year, Tata ate Corus, the company that had eaten British Steel. Equally reassuring (to "traditionalists"), the chief executive of the UK India Business Council doesn't see any branding issues. “If you look at Tetley [tea], you don’t see the Tata brand on it at all," Sharon Bamford says. “They put the interests of the brand and the community they serve at the forefront. The process we’ve seen appears to be a typical Tata deal.”
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To be honest, I think Tata mainly has its eyes on Jaguar’s technology to beef up Tata branded cars.
My main worry is that Tata will kill UK production and send it back to India. Thus, killing any brand cache and “Britishness” that Jaguar had.
However, Tata, may be able to form a European base using steel from Corus (Tata owned) to use at Jaguar and Land Rover (soon to be Tata owned).
Personally, I think if Jaguar is left alone, it’ll do well. Their cars are superb.
If it doesn’t work out, the leaping cat can be grafted onto the $2500 car they’re about to unveil. Jaguar for the masses!
Whether parented by Ford or Tata, the question of Jaguar’s viability rests on the success of the XF…or not.
Culling the X-Type and a well-done revamp of the XJ may also help a bit. However, the Big Question is whether Jag can truly compete with BMW, MB, and Lexus. Frankly, I don’t see any of those brands giving up one iota of market share to Jag.
I believe the key is for Jag to move the products upmarket to do battle with it’s former sister brand– Aston Martin.
As far as I’m concerned, Jaguar should be an $80,000 to $150,000 car brand, and I’m quite confident that Tata will do a good job with it.
Westerners may scoff at “3rd world corporations”, but some of them, Tata included, have posted really good financial results, and some very smart brand development.
An Indian guy I used to work with told me Indian engineers will happily work 100 hour weeks for 1/50th of my regular pay and they are all way smarter and better educated than me too. I still don’t think Tata can save Jaguar.
They have the resources time and money both of which Ford no longer has. So sure they can succeed.
Ford buying Jag was like the giant restaurant chain buying a towns well known best restaurant thats fallen on hard times. They go in looking down on the old place with a let me show you how we do it at the chain mentality.
Tata buying Jag is more like the kid from the wrong side of the tracks becoming a self made multimillionaire buying his hometown restaurant.
He would be more apt to listen and learn from mistakes.
A brand name alone does NOT a product make, IF the product needs to be special to command a high price.
Jaguar has always been a questionable brand. Yes, there are some very special cars that have come from Coventry but in all honest they all came from a single era in this companies history, 1950s and 1960s. EVERYTHING else produced under this brand name has been OK at best.
The cars that established Jaguar as “prestige” brand were NOT luxury cars, they were race/ sports cars that were not expected to be very reliable for everyday use. Even Jaguars best car of all time, the XKE was actually a POS, yet a very desirable one.
From the 1970s until the mid 1990s Jaguar was continously a sagging brand/company with very limited portfolio of two questionable cars, the XJ and XJS. While both cars were beautiful to look at they sucked as cars! They were not very fast, they did not handle all that well, they had piss-poor quality and reliabilty, they were full of old tech, they lagged behind the other players in terms of new safety features (ABS/ Airbags), the dealer network sucked, they were not very comfortable either!
What you had was nice body shape, a cabin with some nice leather and wood, shitty electronics, fussy old tech engines that hated to work with their emission controls, RUST, and shoddy build quality. What amounts to a car built by a company that is perpetually on the brink of disaster!
A Jaguar became synonymous with that car that looks great gracing your driveway but actually is the worst car you ever purchased. “Wont do that again!”
It looked like Jaguar began to show some improvements by the end of the 1980s with its new XJ6. But sadly it was also a big fat POS and slow to boot.
Now here is the catch! Jaguars were still rather unique at this time. Everything about them was still “Jaguar”; inline6s, v12, quirky but interesting erogonomics and switch gear. While not on par with the rivals they still had a true BRitish feel to them that kept them desirable as luxury vehicles. They were junk but special, unique junk!
In comes FoMoCo to f#$K everything that was good about Jaguar up! V12s replaced by corporate V8s, inline6s replaced by corporate v6s. Unique Jaguar switch gears replaced by chessy looking Ford corporate crap. Need more power? add a supercharger! Silly retro design for the S-type, a new XJ that is indistingushable from a 1995 model! A Ford contour based X-type!
A brand name alone does NOT a product make, IF the product needs to be special to command a high price.
Honestly folks there is nothing left of Jaguar today to give any type of prestige factor. A
Mercedes Benz is still a MB
A BMW is still a BMW
A Cadillac is still a Caddy
A Ferrari is still a Ferrari
A Lexus is still a Toyota (what made Lexus a success).
A Jaguar is what?
It seems that the Chinese “get” Buick better than Detroit does and it may well be that Tata gets Jaguar better than Dearborn ever would.
A Jaguar is what?
Jaguar is passion. Jaguars should exude passion and sex appeal. A man or woman driving a Jaguar should feel, no BE, more attractive, interesting, mysterious and perhaps dangerous than they ever could behind the wheel of a Mercedes, BMW or Lexus. In fact, it is hard to even use Lexus and sex appeal in the same sentence!
Jaguar once ran an add touting a Jaguar as the car you should show up at your high school reunion in, and they had it right.
Toyotas are for getting the groceries. Jaguars are for getting …… something else :).
Passionate. Emotional. Special. Different.
Someone once described an E-type’s fenders as looking like silk draped over hips. That is Jaguar.
I have no doubt that Tata will take Jag and make it into something they are proud of. National pride is at stake here, and what a better way to stick it to the colonials than to buy a national symbol and do it better than they ever had?
Other than that, Tata has the resources and tools to do the job. And I even think their management knows enough to get out of the way of progress.
A Jaguar is what?
A turd that can’t be polished no matter who tries.
I think Tata will be much more successful with Jag than Ford was, not that that is very hard. But I think this will make something very special of Jaguar that hasn’t been so for a very long time. I remember the Indian engineers I went to school with at RPI sa extremely hard working geniousus, including the roomate I didn’t like very much, witha completely different pholosophy to work and heritage than the western world.
I also had a friend in high school who’s parents gave her the choice between a Lotus or a Jaguar. I wanted her to get the Lotus but she ended up getting an XJ12. As beautiful as it was to look at and hear it was a total POS. She literally missed 2 days of school a week bringing the car in to get it fixed. She eventually quit driving it and had her boyfriend drive her around. Should got the Lotus.
Jaguar is passion. Jaguars should exude passion and sex appeal. A man or woman driving a Jaguar should feel, no BE, more attractive, interesting, mysterious and perhaps dangerous than they ever could behind the wheel of a Mercedes, BMW or Lexus. In fact, it is hard to even use Lexus and sex appeal in the same sentence!
Jaguar once ran an add touting a Jaguar as the car you should show up at your high school reunion in, and they had it right.
Toyotas are for getting the groceries. Jaguars are for getting …… something else :).
Passionate. Emotional. Special. Different.
Someone once described an E-type’s fenders as looking like silk draped over hips. That is Jaguar.
Unfortunately Jaguar has never actually lived up to this image! That is why it is a fading brand.
Jaguar and a few other automakers seem to have never understood that a passanger car actually is a transportation appliance. It’s number one, primary purpose is to transport the owner wherever he/she wants to go. Looking good and feeling special are incedential qualities that only apply when the cars is actually capable of forefilling its primary mission.
What good is that “special” car to drive to the reunion if you never get there because that o’ so special passion device has left you stranded on the side of the highway.
Jaguar is a failure today because it buit up a reputation for being craptacular garbage that no amount of “passion” could ever overcome.
Jaguar died with Sir William Lyon. But it stumbled, along with the rest of the British auto industry with its acquisition by British-Leyland in the late 60s. “whatdoiknow1” is a bit mis-informed when he said that all Jags were “POS” cars. I would submit that prior to B-L’s arrival in 1968 or so, they built excellent cars. They were world-beaters, at a very reasonable price. An E-type would drive the pants off a Ferrari 250 that cost 3X the Jag. As did the XK’s before them.
Early Jaguars were beautiful to behold (The E-type is a legendary shape that is hard not to lust after!) and their XK engines were an engineering marvel. They powered everything from Le Mans winning race cars, to luxobarges, to sports cars, to British army tanks! Diesel-like torque and tunable to over 400HP. tens of thousands of them still soldier on to this day in everything from family cars to vintage racers. The DOHC XK is a beauty to behold as well… elegant and cathedral like in appearance. Worthy of admiration.
It was only after the B-L merger, and the resulting social and labor strife hit the whole British car industry did quality go out the window at Jaguar. Ford bought what was left… basically a stumbling Zombie, and proceeded to devour what little soul it had left.
I wish Tata luck with the Jaguar name, but I know that the true Jaguar died a long time ago.
–chuck
Well they speak better English than we do, so I would imagine it’s no great leap that they could build a better Jaguar.
Will Jag retailers just roll over to Tata or will the franchises be up for grabs? The reason I’m asking is that my local Jag dealer (combined with Lincoln and Land Rover sucks big time when it comes to customer service. You would think with those products they would be kissing your ass from the time you walked in the door till the time you left. I’ve given up on this dealer and now drive 40 miles to Orlando to get my XK8 serviced.
I’ll say one thing for Ford’s involment in Jaguar, my XK8 is reliable as a brick and has never given me any trouble in 40,000 miles. The only thing that pisses me off is the X-Type which cheapened the brand.
Jaguar is passion. Jaguars should exude passion and sex appeal. A man or woman driving a Jaguar should feel, no BE, more attractive, interesting, mysterious and perhaps dangerous than they ever could behind the wheel of a Mercedes, BMW or Lexus
The fact is the above statement is true, my Jag never gets lost in the sea of Mercedes, Beemers, or Lexus, its a car that stands out in a crowd because its beautiful and unusual. I get complements on my car everyday.
I hope that Tata will take a hands off approach to Jag and give it the resourses it needs to build proper motor cars.
salmon8ter :
January 9th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
A Jaguar is what?
A turd that can’t be polished no matter who tries.
An eloquent response as ever from our esteemed colleague but incorrect as ever.
For those lucky enough to have driven the XF, XK and XJ (as I have), you are about as far wrong as it is possible to be. They are wonderful cars, set apart from the mundane ‘transportation solutions’ provided by Germany and Japan.
Turn up in a Jaguar and people will mark you out as a person with class and style. Turn up in a BMW, and people will mark you out as a wa*ker with no imagination.
Tata will do an excellent job from a base that has been set up by Ford – just wait until you see the new XJ and you will really understand!
At least Jaguar meant something (a certain
je ne sais quois perhaps) what did Lincoln ever mean?
best jaguar ever? XJ13