JAMES ESSES: Jaguar’s new wake makeover is so ridiculous and insulting I’m going to trade mine for one of Elon’s Teslas

Do you want to buy a Jaguar? Because suddenly I don’t want one anymore. My F-Type, once my pride and joy, is now an embarrassment to me.

And apparently I’m just as much of an embarrassment to the manufacturer. They are desperate to disown me and anyone who looks like me – middle class, male, white and “heteronormative.”

In preparation for the launch of its new range on December 2, Jaguar has provoked outrage and ridicule by publishing a 30-second ad featuring eight androgynous and miserable-looking catwalk models in ridiculous clothing. And not a car in sight.

The commercial opens with a yellow pod on a pink Martian landscape. As the doors slide open, with a pulsating mechanical sound, the robot mannequins step out. One has a collar that resembles a lampshade and her puffy skirt around her knees. Next to her stands a woman with a rectangular part of her afro and pompoms for ankles.

Both women happen to be black. On their shoulder sits an Asian man, all in yellow, with a velvet donut around his waist. “Create exuberantly,” the caption reads. ‘Live vibrantly.’

A man with a graying bob spins around like a clockwork dancer on a music box, with paint from a brush in his hand.

“Just delete,” the next caption reads. Then an albino woman takes out a yellow sledgehammer: “Break the molds,” we are urged, but she breaks nothing. ‘Don’t copy anything.’

It’s a ridiculous spectacle, and if the word ‘Jaguar’ doesn’t appear for three seconds at the end, you might assume it was meant to sell perfume, or possibly a hallucinogenic mushroom soup.

It’s an extraordinary departure from the image Jaguar has built up over decades as a ‘British icon’.

The brand is not British, of course, and hasn’t been since it was sold in 2008 to Tata Motors, part of the Indian steel conglomerate of the same name. But so far it is proud of its 80 years of automotive history. .

Even the slogan ‘Copy nothing’ is a tacit nod to the company’s founder, Sir William Lyons, who said: ‘A Jaguar should be a copy of nothing.’

We Jag drivers have long enjoyed the brand’s macho, hedonistic and luxurious reputation. Ten years ago, their promotions department came up with the theme ‘Good to be bad’, with actor Tom Hiddleston at the wheel, revving the engine and reciting Shakespeare.

The cars were showcased to such poor effect that the Advertising Standards Authority immediately banned the campaign. It encouraged buyers, the ASA said, to drive in a way that was ‘irresponsible and illegal’.

There is no danger of that now. The characters in the current ad look like they are traveling alone by electric scooter or UFO.

The reactions on social media are devastating. “How to destroy your brand in 30 seconds,” one commenter wrote under the ad on YouTube. “This isn’t a rebrand, this is Jaguar’s farewell to the world,” said another.

But the marketing department doesn’t seem so much defiant as arrogant and completely unself-aware. What is this anyway?’ asked a user on

“The future,” Jaguar’s social media team responded, managing to sound both pompous and hypocritical in two words. That future includes ditching the traditional logo, with its snarling “big cat” and all-caps lettering, and replacing it with a weedy font that reads “JaGUar.”

When someone asked, “Um, where are the cars in this ad?” Is this for fashion?’ Jaguar responded, “Think of this as a statement of intent.”

“Wake up, go broke,” one tweeter warned. “Go hard,” the manufacturer replied. Billionaire owner of Tesla and X, Elon Musk, joked: “Do you sell cars?” “Yes,” Jaguar replied smugly. ‘We’d love to show it to you. Will you join us for tea in Miami on December 2?’

That’s a reference to the upcoming product launch in Florida – reportedly an electric four-door sedan costing £100,000. Perhaps the most ominous response came when someone questioned whether this was the real Jaguar online account. “Soon you’ll see things our way,” they replied, sounding more like the East German secret police than a British car manufacturer.

Jaguar’s middle-aged director Rawdon Glover is as contrite as his teenage team on social media. He expects that the majority of current Jaguar customers will leave the brand, and that 85 percent of future sales will go to new customers.

It’s clear that he and his executives are ashamed of the people who buy his cars… people like me. We are seen as predominantly white, Brexity and past the prime of youth. We are no longer welcome and neither is our money.

Apparently he is unaware of the catastrophic consequences of American beer brand Budweiser, which tried to give its Bud Light brand a woke makeover by hiring transgender ‘TikTok influencer’ Dylan Mulvaney to revamp its image. So many people switched to drinking other lagers in protest that Bud Light lost its dominance as an American bestseller.

Last week, Boots tried a similar trick with their Christmas advert, starring Adjoa Andoh, the actress who described the King’s coronation as ‘terribly white’, in the role of Mrs Claus – and using gender-neutral pronouns.

Unsurprisingly, this sparked a backlash online. Boots clearly hasn’t gotten the message that people want to be entertained and charmed by Christmas adverts – not laughed at or laughed at.

But increasingly, companies seem willing to jettison their entire customer base in favor of such woke virtue signaling, even if it hits them in the pocketbook. Activists first. Loyal customers come second.

Not that Jag owners, who – for one reason or another – might be tempted to go electric after this catastrophic rebrand, will be able to get their hands on one anytime soon. The next generation of EVs isn’t expected to hit the market until 2026, so customers will go elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in a double insult to loyal British Jag drivers, overseas buyers will still be able to order the F-Pace, which went out of production in Britain earlier this month.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that electric cars are not the environmentally friendly wonders we’ve been led to believe. Battery production involves the extraction of rare metals, which often causes serious damage to the environment.

And although their electric motors produce negligible CO2 emissions, much of the energy they consume is generated using fossil fuels. Critics claim their tires disintegrate more quickly due to their greater weight, which causes pollution. And Britain’s potholed roads are already unfit for use in many places.

All of Jaguar’s insistence that electric cars are ‘the future’ ignores the obvious fact that Britain doesn’t have the infrastructure to support the electric cars we already have, let alone the millions more.

The charging points do not exist. Most people don’t have their own driveway to charge overnight. And our National Grid is not ready for a huge increase in demand.

I don’t believe electric vehicles are the future. Neither does the general public, as evidenced by the declining sales of electric vehicles. Other manufacturers, from Ford to Porsche, report that the market is shrinking and are cutting back on electricity production.

Even if I decided to buy one, it wouldn’t be from a salesman in shoulder-length PVC gloves and shaved eyebrows, dressed in 50 feet of shiny mesh. It would be a Tesla from Wake’s enemy, Elon Musk.