SHARP Drives: An Exclusive Ride in the All-Electric Jaguar 4-Door GT Prototype
The world of luxury cars has never seen a reboot quite like this. Jaguar has pressed pause on its extraordinary 90-year history of making fast, beautiful and desirable sports cars and sedans. For around a year, it will neither make nor sell any cars at all, putting clear blue water between Jaguar old and new. Then, early in 2027, it returns with the first of what will become a three-car range: all purely electric, all selling at much higher price points, and all sharing the dramatic, almost brutalist styling previewed by the Type 00 concept car revealed late in 2024.
Jaguar might only have hit pause on production this year, but it hit reset way back in 2020, when the bold strategic decision was made to make the marque entirely electric and move it way upmarket, building fewer cars but selling them at twice the previous average transaction price. Design work started then and, although the Type 00 concept gave us our first look at new Jaguar, it was actually the last to be completed, the three production cars having been signed off first. Type 00 was actually a ‘conceptified’ version of the first production car, an as-yet unnamed four-door grand tourer. The two SUVs which will follow will doubtless be the biggest sellers, but the GT comes first, reinforcing that clean break with its dramatic and possibly polarising design. Its long hood, low roofline and cab-rearward stance are almost identical in proportions to the concept car it spawned.
Jaguar might not be making or selling any cars in 2026, but it will still be busy. The GT will be revealed (and named) in the summer, and order books will open then with prices around $220,000 CAD and first deliveries early in ’27. And its small army of engineers continue to refine the cars, ensuring new models ride and handle as well as Jaguars always have — even if they look dramatically different.
To prove the progress they’re making, and to get Jaguar onto your shortlist now for the car you’ll be ordering next year, SHARP was granted a ride in a heavily disguised prototype of the GT at Jaguar’s private test track in the British Midlands. The exterior is equally well-disguised but once you’re in — a process closer to entering a coupe than a saloon — it’s as striking to look out of as to look at. You sit low, with a high central console which leaves you feeling cocooned but not claustrophobic. The windscreen is a little more restricted than in a sedan or SUV but it affords a dramatic view out over the acres of hood.
As we roll towards the track, this rebooted Jaguar already feels like the best of Jaguars past (from the passenger seat, at least). It aces the first-fifty-yards test, the air suspension reacting softly and near-silently to poor surfaces at low speeds. Once on the track, the test driver pushes harder, and eventually very hard indeed. That impressive lack of noise or vibration remains all the way to 130mph and beyond. There is some deliberate, contained, engineered-in body roll, but this big and heavy car never loses composure. It deals with every bump and hump with a single, well-damped movement, but without ever feeling harsh.
I’m told that the steering has been tuned to be appropriately calm and measured rather than over-alert. A combination of rear-steer and the low polar moment of inertia, created by containing all the major masses inside that massive wheelbase, means the GT still feels as if it pivots in the middle like a mid-engined sports car. It’s astonishingly agile for such a long, heavy car. The triple-motor layout helps too: the twin rear motors allow proper torque, vectoring and firing this 1000-horsepower car out of corners with massive urge and seemingly unbreakable traction, but without the neck-snap of some equally powerful EVs. It’s another deliberate choice to make this car feel more Jaguar. Like the Rolls-Royce Spectre, the combination of overwhelming performance and eerie refinement means EV power feels right for the brand. This car reaches the logical end point of where Jaguar was heading decades ago, with its ever more-powerful, more-silken V12s.
“We’re getting into the dynamics of the car now because so far it’s all been about design,” Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s managing director tells me. “Design is really important for Jaguar, but equally important is the need to drive like a Jaguar. So we went back to our iconic driving cars of the past, and drove them again to understanding what made them great.”
“The EV powertrain has enabled us to design the car to look unlike anything else, but also to deliver that thousand horsepower in a way that we wouldn’t be able to with an ICE engine. The driving characteristics, the perfect 50-50 weight distribution, the centre of gravity: those are all huge advantages.”
He’ll need them. His first model is plainly already fast, refined and composed, even with another year of development remaining, but it will face tough competition from from the very best cars the German premium brands make. “But when has Jaguar been really successful?” Glover asks. “When you’ve been able to access a level — of either performance or visual differentiation or luxury — akin to what you’re getting at a much, much higher price point. For me, that’s something else this car has in common with what Jaguar has done historically.”
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