Watch: Up close with radical Jaguar Type 00 concept at Goodwood

Its name, which reprises the word ‘Type’ used for so many great Jaguars, also suggests that future nomenclature won’t stray too far from the past.

Although the Type 00 is a two-door car with forward-hinged dihedral doors and built on a shorter-than-production wheelbase, it tells us plenty about the forthcoming saloon. We already know this is a low, lithe car in the old Jaguar mould, with a raked roof, a long wheelbase and a uniquely long bonnet.

It’s also one of a new wave of cars that ditches a heavy and fundamentally useless rear window and uses twin side cameras, and a digital rear-view mirror like that offered in its Defender cousin.

The Type 00’s shape is defined by long, confident lines that spell out beautiful, opulent proportions, according to its maker. The modernist surfaces are starkly simple, almost flat in places, but they incorporate sleek compound curves where needed.

The overall effect is boldness – a key aim of the designers – yet the surfacing and sparse details carry impressions of sophistication and restraint, as befits a Jaguar selling in the £120,000 bracket, more than twice the price of an outgoing-generation Jag.

The glasshouse stresses the theme of lowness. The Type 00 has a fairly high waist and a flattish roof with a ‘fast’ rear panel (without window) that gives it almost a chop-top look. In that one way, it faintly resembles one previous Jaguar: the XJS.

The car has a bluff front with no ‘proper’ grille, using Jaguar’s new 16-bar Strike Through design device as frontal embellishment. The same device is used again atop the long bonnet and it even flows through the raked windscreen to become a fascia-topped feature. The massive 23in alloys also use the same multi-line Strike Through as part of their own design.

Inside, it is a stunning, cream-coloured compartment for two that shuns leather in favour ofmodern, sustainable textiles such as Kvadrat (already popular in production Defenders and Range Rovers). It features a pair of elegantly designed bucket seats, constructed in a way that avoids visible stitching (as in the Defender Octa). There’s also a surface called Travertine Stone on the centre console (a genuine stone veneer) and a brass spine runs along the length of the cabin.

The concept’s controls and instruments are comprehensive, rethought but minimised in what has become a very JLR way. “Just as on the outside, deployable technologies are a hallmark of the interior,” said interior design chief Tom Holden.

This is shown by two rearview screens (“that glide silently and theatrically”), which save the Type 00 from having untidy exterior rear-vision mirrors. The door releases are in the roof console next to a long panoramic roof. And instead of choosing your driving mode from a switch, you drop a brass token into a slot in the centre console.

Some of it is beautiful, some features are gimmicky and, unlike with the exterior, it’s far from clear how influential the Type 00’s cabin will be on the 2026 production car.

Overwhelmingly, the Type 00 fulfils its mission to be “a copy of nothing”, to employ once again that grievously overused quote from Jaguar founder Sir William Lyons. It also brings a new logic to the much-discussed rebranding elements: the Device Mark, the Strike Through, the Maker’s Mark (the new ‘leaper’ and simpler ‘JR’ medallion).

The new ‘jaGuar’ script looks okay on the car, despite its middle capital letter, and the Strike Through provides interesting detail for the car’s frontal surface – where traditionally a grille would be – while also giving the rear body panel an unmistakable ‘new Jaguar’ identity. The new brass leaper provides detail on each of the car’s front flanks and the ‘JR’ medallions are used as wheel centres. It all comes together far better than many critics might have imagined a few weeks ago.

In most ways, the Type 00’s design collides head on with the proportions of the outgoing I-Pace, Jaguar’s first full EV that was launched only six years ago and whose creators took pains to emphasise their car’s forward-control layout (and consequent short nose) and to brand it an SUV. This allowed it a sleek but high-riding shape with plenty of space for the battery below the cabin floor. We have yet to discover how the new-generation Jaguars will accommodate their batteries while retaining their low-slung stance.

The lowness of the Type 00 and the similarly low-riding production models to come promise a relatively small frontal area (despite a very upright, bluff front) as a way of delivering decent aerodynamic performance.

But good aero is not the only priority, it seems. Jaguar managing director Rawdon Glover said it was a key objective from the project’s earliest days to resist – for concept and production models – the arch-conventional, somewhat hackneyed use of high-riding, forward-control shapes that had “spent too long in the wind tunnel” and been adopted by many current EVs as a way of delivering Jaguar’s avowed “fearless creativity” of design.

Though everyone at JLR takes pains to credit the whole 600-strong JLR design group for work on this project, the influence of McGovern, JLR’s chief creative officer whose success with highly profitable Range Rover models has underpinned the four-year-old Reimagine plan, is clear. The idea to “think Range Rover” at Jaguar has driven the adoption of its reductive, modernist approach to the new cars.

While promoting something “very different”, McGovern sympathises with the plight of his design predecessors at Jaguar, pointing out that the company’s product objectives 10 years ago simply wouldn’t have allowed this bold approach. “Back then, the company thought very differently,” he said, “and was aiming at very different competitors.”

The target was to grab sales from BMW and Audi with good but mainstream premium models like the XE and XF saloons and the E-Pace and F-Pace SUVs. In the past months, all of those cars, as well as the I-Pace have been ditched.

Understandably, none of Jaguar’s bigwigs wants to get into a discussion about the size of the risk they’re taking with Jaguar, though most admit there is one. JLR CEO Adrian Mardell takes a determined tone by insisting that “there will be no success for JLR without Jaguar”. That’s probably just in case any of us thought JLR people could have a happier life at Gaydon by shutting Jaguar, selling the name to the Chinese and concentrating on making super-successful Range Rovers for a living.

While the reinvention risks alienating some of Jaguar’s traditional customers, the firm seems determined it will win over a new clientele of car lovers with £120,000 to spend. With its completely new products, this Gaydon team wants to live up to Enzo Ferrari’s age-old quote about their predecessors’ E-Type being the most beautiful car in the world.

Glover, who has spent a year telling people how excited he is by the size of the challenge ahead, cites copious research to back his view of the people who will buy a new-gen Jaguar.

“First and foremost,” he said, “they’ll be independently minded. They’ll have an appreciation of design and will be looking for exclusivity. We expect them to be young and wealthy, connected and more likely to live urban lives. They’ll be cash rich and time poor, so every aspect of their journey with us will need to be effortless.”