A car commercial can be clever, glorious, talky, edgy — but this new one is idiotic.
Jaguars — the cars, not the cats — have long had an enviable image: a car for the rich, the cool, and the possibly criminal. Legendary British entrepreneur Arthur Daley drove a Jag, and so did the great Inspector Morse, George Harrison, and two James Bonds. Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) in The Long Good Friday drove Jaguars (and was driven in one, not always happily). A friend of mine has a magnificent vintage racing-green Jag, enriching the mechanics of New York State. An E-type was the car that small British boys of my generation thought was about as cool as it got. An E-type was Austin Powers’s Shaguar.
My father bought a slightly battered Daimler Sovereign (a close relative of the Jaguar) at the depths of the 1973 oil crisis, reassuring my (dubious) mother that it had “cost less than a Mini because of the petrol [gas] price, which would go down in due course.” As with all his cars, my father drove the Daimler (Arthur Daley had one too) for an astonishing number of miles and years, and into the ground. The engine was fine though. He sold the car years later “for less than the cost of a Mini” (if that Mini had circled the globe many times, taking routes that ran through numerous small, but intense, wars).
A few months after the sale, a policeman showed up at my parents’ house, a surprise as social media had yet to be invented. He asked my mother if she had been to Wales recently. “No.” Had my father been to Wales recently? “No.” The policeman laughed and said he didn’t think that either of them had done. He was just checking. “We’ve been keeping an eye out on you both.”
“You have?”
“Yes. Do you own a Daimler?”
“Not anymore. We sold it a few months ago.”
“Yes, we’ve seen the record of that. But we have to ask because it was used a few weeks ago in a bank robbery — in Wales.”
Daimler badge, Jaguar soul.
And so to this ad for Jaguar that showed up on X yesterday. Fifty-seven thousand comments and counting. Please take a look and see what you think.
Elon Musk took a look and tweeted out a question:
Do you sell cars?
(No car is shown in the spot.)
The point of a car company is, as Musk knows well, to sell cars. The point of a car commercial is to help a car company sell cars. It can be clever, glorious, talky, or faintly meta. It can be banned by Britain’s relentlessly prim advertising censor regulator for “glorifying speed” and thus breaching “rules on social responsibility and motoring.” And yes, it can be edgy, but this new one, given the likely market for a Jaguar, is idiotic; a small reminder, in its own way, that the corporate managerial class (see also ESG, HR, etc.) does not always have the shareholder uppermost in its mind.
On the other hand, this response to the ad (complete with mildly profane British insult) mocks what those so virtuously moving to Bluesky are saying about the “hellsite” that they, but not (I suspect) their burners, have abandoned. It’s funnier still if you know who is in the car, but that’s not essential.
Oh yes (via the Daily Mail):
Jaguar’s boss has defended the car maker’s decision to stop selling new cars for a year ahead of its bold transition to electric vehicles.
Of course.
And so, from a different time, here’s this (soundtrack by Moby).