Transcript
Ian Callum
Thank you, Gerry. That leaves me with seven minutes. Okay. Well, I’d like to talk about a car that’s very close to my heart, actually. Does it work? Yes. CX75. This is a small project – I say, relatively speaking. This is a small project we did about a year or so ago but I think the significance of this is much greater than the car itself, much greater even than the sum of the parts.
But first of all, let’s just go back through where Jaguar has been over the last few years. You may be familiar with Jaguar, you may be familiar with the image of Jaguar and this is where we were only five or six years ago. If I may say so myself, the design of these cars were rather retrospective. The XK, the S-type; very retrospective, and of course, the XJ.
But what they weren’t doing was telling the true story. These designs were actually telling something which was part of the past of the company and not part of the future. In fact, the XJ here was one of the most significant pieces of manufacturing of car bodies ever in full aluminium, probably one of the most advanced car bodies ever.
So one of my jobs was to change this and we’ve now turned this company – I believe, and we all believe at Jaguar – into a modern company for the 21st Century through design. Design has done this. The XK, one of the most significant sports cars in the world, certainly now one of the fastest. The XF is now taking on the true mantle of the sports saloon car as that old Mark Two used to do all these years ago.
And then the XJ, I think, is hugely significant, not only in its mechanical attributes, its aluminium build but also, dare I say it, in its design, in its shape and it’s a non-tangible element of design itself, that aesthetic.
But let’s go back to CX75. CX75 was a project that we were asked to do to celebrate 75 years of Jaguar so it left the design department really quite an open remit to do what they wanted. And so, boys being boys, we decided to do a sports car, a supercar. And we also wanted to be influenced by something that we really cherished, that was part of our heritage, an XJ13, an E-Type. We let it just sink into us, but not to copy it, just let it influence us in the proper way. So the XJ13 was the starting point in terms of atmosphere – again, that intangible.
So we worked up some ideas and drawings, some of which you see here. The interior; equally important. I don’t think many people realise significant interiors these days. The amount of work that’s involved, the number of algorithms running around these things is huge. The amount of computing power, the ergonomics, the safety factors, all the elements you have to take on board to create an interior, is hugely significant. And then we have to make it look inviting as well.
But the real significance in this car was not just to produce a beautiful-looking car, which actually is Jaguar’s remit. A German journalist once said to me, he says, form must follow function, yes? I said, yes. One of our functions at Jaguar is to be beautiful. I make no apologies about it.
However, this is very significant in that what we wanted to do with this car was make it an electric car, make it significantly correct for the 21st Century. However, it couldn’t be pure plug-in because the range wasn’t enough. We could put an extended-range four-cylinder engine in or something smaller but we found these very significant turbines produced by Blade and Jets in Isle of Man – British – of which I believe Tata now owns a part of the company – incidentally, our mother company.
So this is a very significant move forward and what these jets do, turning at something like 80,000 revs per minute, is actually charge the batteries of this electric car. They take an enormous amount of air, they suck in an enormous amount of air and they produce enormous amount of energy to actually charge the battery so it’s a full-electric car, a motor at each corner, hugely powerful but sustainable – the right answer for the right time.
The thing is, you must remember, is that Jaguar is a brand that’s about beauty and it’s about performance and just because we’re moving into the 21st Century in a sustainable way, we cannot let these attributes go about performance and driveability. And those of you here who understand the pleasure of driving a fast car will know exactly what I mean about that.
Now, the great thing about this technology is – I know electric cars historically have always looked a bit odd. I think it’s something that these marketing people make up and say, we must do electric car because it appeals to odd people – maybe, I don’t know. But this is a supercar, this has to look exotic, this has to look really cool. And great thing about this was, with all these electric components, it actually gave us greater ability to produce something, more of a work of art than a conventional drive train would do, with electric power because we had all these elements we could place around the car, quite independent of each other. They’re not joined together by shafts and mechanical elements. They’re joined together by wires.
It actually gave us the opportunity to create something that was more artistic, ironically, than ever before. So roll on, electric cars. And here’s a picture of the final car and you can see there that what this does – to Jonathan’s point – what this does, this entity of producing something like this draws everybody into it, every function, every factor within the Jaguar and Land Rover domain; manufacturing, the attributes group – very strict group, incidentally – the design group, of course, the ergonomic group and all the structural group, the body structure group. They all came in at this point to be part of this great story of XF because they wanted to be part of this wonderful new invention.
Here’s some images of the car. I could talk forever about the aesthetics about it, about that intangible. And don’t underestimate the intangible. It is very important. People mostly buy cars through emotions. Yes, they will post-rationalise why they bought their Volvo or their Prius or their Jaguar or, indeed, their Aston Martin. You can even post-rationalise an Aston Martin. I know, I’ve been there.
But it’s the emotional value of a car that matters as much to people, customers, as anything else and that’s what we do here. We create emotion and this emotion, of course, as I said, goes right in the interior. Incidentally, these lights you see lighting up in the interior are actually the hi-fi system, the Bowers and Wilkins hi-fi system. So when the music comes on, the light comes on with it; sound and light working in perfect harmony.
But this is about being in the right place, the right time, working with the right instruments, the right ergonomics, putting it all together as an experience, something to wholly enjoy and to be part of. Something else significant in this car is the seats are fixed in it so when you sit in it, you’re actually enveloped into the car itself, you become part of the machine. That is part of the emotional value of the car.
And of course, then we released the car at the Paris show last year. It was significant. This is the point I want to make. We produced one model, a concept model with huge, significant aesthetic value, I believe, huge technical value, which you can see for yourself. And it created such a buzz at the show, it was the most talked-about car at the Paris Motor Show last year.
And consequently, it was the most talked-about car in the press – not just the motoring press; lifestyle press, economic press – of any car after the Paris show and that’s a fact. So this is what this small project, born out of a few drawings from a few, very few creative people, bring it together as an entity and showing what the power of design can actually do for a company.
And that, to me, is what’s significant. What we’re actually going to do is we’re going to build this now. We were never intending to. It was a showpiece of technology and design but the reaction has been so good, we’re going to build it within the next two years, probably only a few hundreds, but that’s fine. But what this is doing for Jaguar as a brand is getting the right message over about our technology and about our design, something that we’ve missed for so long in great abundance.
Yes, we have our great products out there now but this will just reinforce exactly where Jaguar’s abilities are. So with that, I thank you for listening.