Entry-level Jaguar on hold until next XF sedan comes out

Jaguar has been doing very well with themselves, reinventing their image with the great XF and the new XJ. With that success, Jaguar announced a little a while ago that a baby Jaguar or a BMW 3-Series competitor was in the works a la X-Type replacement. But the Mother Cat just announced that the baby Jag will have to wait.

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According to insider sources, Jag’s future is currently under heavy maintenance with its new Tata-based management, which is still led by Adrian Hallmark.

Next to the baby Jag, they also had an SUV dubbed the X760 put on the bulletin board for launch around 2014, just before an all-new XF replacement in 2015. But with the new plans, the Jaguar XF replacement takes priority.

“We definitely won’t kill today’s XF with a new small car,” Hallmark said. “We’ll kill it with the new XF.”

Hallmark said that they want to also wait until the new 2012 F30 BMW 3-Series and the new C-Class so they can have a better idea of what the new standards will be in order to stay competitive. With the way cars are growing in size, we can see the baby Jaguar being as big as the current XF.

“The small car has to be designed and engineered to be exactly right for its market,” said Bob Joyce, Jaguar’s chief of engineering.

This all adds up to say that Jaguar is being very cautious with how it will execute its baby Jaguar and its outcome is very dependent on the future success of the current XF.

“We’ve got to be careful and not be too British and think that just because we didn’t hit the bullseye first time, we can’t hit it a second time,” Hallmark said, “We haven’t realized the full potential of the XF yet. It was a vision and it has been very successful. Why can’t we do the same in the segment below?”

Jaguar B99 Concept:

– By: Omar Rana

Source: AutoCar