At that point it meets most of what we, collectively, want from the car. So you choose the basic design, and over maybe two and a half years, the clay model evolves to include most of those attributes. It ain’t over until the production line rolls In my latter years at Jaguar, those 32 models had fallen to probably only two or three because the upper management had the confidence in us to get it right at a very early stage. And that got me through a lot of political nonsense. I had to explain why the grille was that shape, for example. Designers can be arrogant and say, “It’s that way because that’s how I think it should be.” I learned very quickly that that approach was not going to work. That’s when I learned to explain why I was doing things. I knew what the car should look like and I steered the discussions very carefully but gently towards the car that I wanted.
Coming out on top ian walkthrough series#
We challenge those numbers every time because if you take all your attributes off a 3 Series or a C-Class, you’re going to end up with the same shape. So any good designer wants to break those rules. That’s frustrating for a designer, because if you take the generic dimensions of the competitive set, you wind up with the same answer. Hundreds of attributes will be written for every new car, on dynamics, cost, dimensions, and everything else. When you’re replacing a car like XE or XF you know what the competition is, and your parameters are set by that.
But it’s a discipline you have to hold to. That frustrates designers because they want to express themselves and to exaggerate. We will not over-promise.” So when you see a concept from Jaguar it tends to be very close to reality. So I said to the team, “I’m never going to do that again. You couldn’t get in the back of the concept, it was so low. And rather than the XF coming out with a great euphoric notion of newness, because it replaced the S-Type, it was overwhelmed by the radical proportions of the C-XF. We indulged in a lower roofline, bigger wheels and sliver lamps. We did the C-XF to create a bit of a buzz, probably six months before the first XF came out. We just wanted to do something purely from an artistic point of view, to show the world how beautiful a car could be in the modern idiom. Its packaging, size, everything was set by the design team.
And then of course the ultimate expression was the C-X75, which we created purely as a concept car to celebrate 75 years of Jaguar.
The R-D6 was to demonstrate our new V6 diesel. We did the R Coupe to show the world that we’d arrived and to demonstrate how a Jaguar could evolve and break away from the traditional. Two came right at the beginning, because the X-Type had just come out and XJ was about to be launched, and it would be a while before we’d get a chance to show what we could do with production cars. Pure concept cars are very rare, but at least they’re almost entirely the domain of the design team. Even when the suits let you get on with it, you won’t always get it right Julian Thompson would say to me, “Are you going to tell him it’s not his?” and I’d say, “I think you should tell him, Julian, he works for you.” We’d have this stand-off over who was going to let the poor chap know his design hadn’t won. You’re dealing with some sensitive people in the creative world, and it’s tricky when you’re rejecting their designs. We have to be quite ruthless, with ourselves and with individuals. There’ll be somebody who starts it off, then others get involved, and then I’d get involved as Design Director, and I was always very much hands on. But you can’t often pin a design on one person.