While Jaguar’s move into the SUV market has been an amazing success with the F-Pace and I-Pace collecting a host of awards, the company’s new design director is committed to a future of sports cars.

Speaking at the launch of the new F-Type, Julian Thomson told AutoExpress that he is keen to strengthen Jaguar’s sports car line-up, especially as the F-Type is currently the only sports car in their line-up.

“Jaguar will always build sports cars. I’d love to do more than one,” Thomson said.
In this day and age of electrification and autonomous technology, a part of me thinks there may be a resurgence of people enjoying transportation for transportation’s sake and driving for driving’s sake.

“Whether that makes the market bigger I don’t know, but I think there is a threat to volume production cars and they are going to struggle to find a position on what they do. I’d hope that truly special and luxury cars, sports cars, will find a place where they have the option to be more exotic.”
While sales of sports cars remain relatively low compared to the growing SUV and saloon market, Jaguar are still committed to producing a successor to the F-Type in 2022, although Thomson believes that they will hold-back from producing a pure-electric sports car like some of their illustrious rivals.
“Cars like the Pininfarina [Battista] and Lotus [Evija] which have sheer amounts of power are not the answer,” he explained. “You need to have something which you interact with and love and have that sense of connection with. I don’t think that can be done through sheer power.

“I guess what’s more difficult for us to understand, is that you buy a sports car because you want something really interactive and emotional engagement - so we’re still thinking about what would be the electric sports car offering. It’s not clear to us yet.”

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