The jaguar doesn’t growl. It poses.
One and all have decried the wildly controversial rebranding of Jaguar. Besides the rebrand being called “foolish”, “stupid”, or a “colossal waste of money”, I have not seen much commentory on how this rebrand might be a interesting symptom of deeper changes underfoot in the auto industry, spurred on by emergent internet meme culture.
Image courtesy Jaguar, its new rebrand
For a design perspective on cars, this TED talk from way back points to how to see cars in the intangible.
Yes, cars are art. Cars are media. Hence, they have always been tied deeply to human identity. With the emergence of self-driving cars and robotaxis, Jaguar appears to be grappling with nothing less than a tectonic shift in the sector. This rebrand moves shiftingly away from its historical associations with overt, externalized dominance—the "predator's seat" archetype—and pivots towards a subtler, internalized form of seething, yet calm, aggression. This is not about abandoning power but about reframing it as deliberate, and self-contained. This is self-control rather than control. But most semblance to anything concrete and definable ends there. While the "Copy Nothing" slogan suggests a bold attempt to forge a unique identity, the execution feels less definitive than ever, and more reflective of a broader uncertainty within automotive design.
To me, this evolution mirrors disruptive changes in how vehicles are perceived. As media technology increasingly saturate the cabin, the car itself shifts from being about the thrill of driving to becoming an experiential and connective space. When driving becomes optional, focus naturally turns inward to screens, mediated content immersion, interpersonal interactions, as well as outward, but to augmented and perhaps even virtual reality projections on the external world. The tactile, mechanical connection to the road diminishes, replaced by digitally manipulable experiences. Which means a car’s passengers can experience within the thing anything they damn well fancy. Hence Jaguar’s rebrand avoids explicit references to cars, technology, or even mobility. There is no car to show because it isn’t about the car anymore. It is entirely about the identity within. And so the ads lean towards an austere, abstract, and wildly colourful aesthetic populated mainly by detached figures that seem artificially perfect yet strangely lifeless.
Cars, once firmly anchored in the “real”—solid objects traversing a tangible world —are now increasingly ‘hyperreal’ spaces, to use that compelling term from Baudrillard. The car itself does not have an identity beyond the one you choose to imbibe it with for today.
I find it deeply ironic - and telling - that the slogan of the new brand is “Copy nothing!”, where the entire re-brand effort is a product of generative AI, which on some level is arguable a mechanism that creates copies of copies of copies. In that regard, this could well be simultaneously the first fully AI-driven automotive rebranding effort ever - and one to vehemently deny it! But it seems unlikely to me that this will be the last.
