There was a misconception - and I think they unwittingly or not contributed to it - that Jaguar's bosses weren't interested in its past.
The messaging was all new new new; the design chief's line was that Jaguar had "no brand equity"; the old shapes had gone; the old logos had gone; car production was stopping. Everything old had been cast aside in a frenzy of a pastel moonscape future.
The truth of it, at least from the perspective of Jaguar's engineers, was rather different. They understood that things needed to change (had the company been selling 100,000 or more cars a year, they might not have done), but their preparation work on this, a new electric luxury Jaguar, didn't involve abandoning everything that had come before.
By the time we had seen the adverts, the new car's final design had already been picked. From some 17 different full-size clay model options, the bosses had chosen this one. (Whether you would prefer to alternatively end that previous sentence with a question mark and/or an exclamation mark is entirely up to you.)
The task from that point was to decide on the car's character and to help shape that, senior designers and engineers pulled an array of previous Jaguars from their collections and from the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust and spent days poring over their details, their characters and, just as importantly, their dynamics, as they set out to define how exactly a modern Jaguar should drive.
Which brings us now to Revi in northern Sweden, 60 miles shy of the Arctic Circle, and to the million square metres of frozen lake where JLR conducts its winter testing. A small number of the 150 Jaguar prototypes (it's still officially unnamed, so let's go with Type 00, the name of the concept) are here now, alongside various Land Rovers and 80-90 JLR engineers.
The British company has been coming to this area near Arjeplog for more than 40 years, like the rest of the European car industry and more besides, because of the consistent conditions for making sure that things work as they should. Unlike my nose hairs, which, rather unsettlingly, have frozen in the -15deg C weather.
Jaguar's people introduce the car to us with lots of use of the word 'about' – approximations of numbers that will be confirmed later. We won't see the finished Type 00 until late summer, you won't be able to order one until the autumn and it won't reach people's driveways until next spring.
But there are new things we will find out now. Including what it's like to drive – in these conditions, at least.
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The question was never that Jaguar couldn't do such a car, but if it should?
Just imagine if the engineers were let loose and the desginers tasked with creating a modern and accessible Jaguar? Not something that tells 99.9% of Jaguar customers where to go?
That was what was needed, with more entry points to the Jaguar brand. A 1-Series or A-Class rival added to the mix, increaing the sales. Because remember Jaguar never competed 1:1 with the German marques. It always had both arms held behind its back.
And one of the problems that Jaguar had was marketing. They've already had a class leading EV - the I-Pace. But their marketing department were absolutely clueless in how to sell the car; how to educate the customers on why it was so good.
Not forgetting the board were negligent in letting Thierry Bollore continue with a plan that had already got him fired. And Renault are now doing very well by comparison. The answer was never to do the "Type-O". The answer was to let Callum and the engineers create a modern and efficient car that did rival those from Germany and elsewhere.