Car Science: moths to neon
Hello! You're reading Car Science; please consider subscribing, it's free and helps me.
Hey,
It’s been a really long time since I’ve felt like I’ve had anything to write. There’s a 6000 word email about picking nodules out of the Clarion Clipperton Zone I should edit but it barely feels like the sort of thing I’m qualified to think about every time I look at it.
This will be a weird edition of Car Science because it’s, well, not really about science. I’m going to weakly justify it by talking about some research into headlights but mostly this is about the weird, violent response to Jaguar rebranding itself this week.
Jaguar is a pretty beleaguered brand. It suffered half a decade of losses until earlier this year and is still up-and-down, at best, about where it stands. It’s easy to see why: what, exactly, is Jaguar about in the 2020s?
Losing money, is the answer. Jaguar’s brand relies on a certain sense of luxury and style, desirability and elegance always having been part of the brand. Performance has been part of what it stands for, especially with intermittent but memorable motorsport success but it’s unfortunately true that most people remember the Le Mans winner as a Silk Cut car more than a Jaguar and that, though it is as painful as ever to say this, very few people are aware Jaguar is one of the most successful teams in Formula E.
In fact the most successful team not to win a drivers’ championship, by really quite some distance. It’s, after all, all very worthy taking the constructors’ title but the team’s own confused deflation about doing exactly that, after both drivers fell out of contention in a series of horrible errors during the final race last season, is quite a grim summary of where Gaydon finds itself.
The problem is Jaguar’s been making cars that, at sufficient volume of sales, would be profitable. It’s just that they’re not selling that many, which means when they are selling cars they’re selling them at a loss. A bit like how the maths said either Mitch Evans or Nick Cassidy was guaranteed to win the world drivers’ championship until they fumbled it away. To Pascal Wehrlein and Porsche, a brand that allegedly (it’s quite likely) makes the highest profit margin per car it sells of any automaker out there.
Sometimes motorsport can be so very on the nose. Like that massive diamond Jaguar lost off their F1 car in Monaco once. Anyway, enough about this, this isn’t really what’s interesting: you just need to know that Jaguar has been in bad shape, what it’s been doing hasn’t been working and so it’s going to do something different to try and actually make money. God knows, it’s not an easy proposition, as a car company.
The way it plans to do that is with a radical rebrand. There’s plenty to be said about this, such as the fact it’s apparently supposed to be written jaGUar and why no one brought up that makes people think of tiny desserts in little ramekins you always think you’ll have a use for again but realistically never will.
The most striking thing the brand is going to do is: stop making cars. Rather than attempt to nurse its current, loss-making product line through a transition phase Jaguar has chosen to stop losing money that way. It sounds a bit wild but this is honestly very sensible: there are a lot of reasons OEMs are currently losing money and a lot of them are out of their control, including supply chain chaos, instability of tariffs and incentives and difficulty delivering finished vehicles due to the RoRo crisis.
The rebrand means moving to a starting vehicle price of £120,000. At that price point, the volume Jaguar is anticipating selling makes itself profitable. It is an extremely luxury segment, although far from outside the point that cars are being flogged at lately - it’s roughly the starting point for most luxury electric SUVs, which is probably what the car will be.
That said, normalising cars costing that much is part of the growing divide between poverty and luxury. It is, also, it’s got to be said, not pinko commie left woke shit to be pumping out six-figure luxury ultrawagons.
So why has the campaign become a culture war point that has commentators from Nigel Farage to Marina Hyde ridiculing the fact it has Diffrunt Looking People in it? Exactly that, it turns out.
It’s not fair to say we don’t know very much about this rebrand, since Jaguar has told us tons about it. Although it hasn’t come with a car launch there is a tease of a futuristic corner for a concept that’s coming and which the car press has side-of-mouth suggested might be slightly divisive looking. Good! If it was Yet Another Of Exactly The Same Looking Electric SUV That’s Trying To Differentiate Itself By Having Slightly Different Infotainment Options and the brand reckoned they could flog that for the price of a one-bedroom flat in Leamington Spa then that’d be some goddamned terrible marketing.
Overlooking any of the (really quite interesting) details, though, is pure, frothing rage. How dare - dare - an OEM that clearly not a lot of people are buying cars from do something that people who have never in their lives ever considered buying cars from don’t like? Which is show women and black people in their marketing materials.
How dare a brand risk angering people not buying their products? What poor marketing, they surely are fools. Sitting here in an LN4 hoodie and some old sweatpants I can tell you I am not exactly a fashionista and given what some creep in my Tumblr inbox called my “minimum wage arc” I’m clearly not in the market for luxury.
But I am just about smart enough to realise that there is an immense industry based around things I don’t want and can’t afford. Or who knows, I might actually want this weird new Jaguar if the little bit of retrofuturistic edging and buffed chrome we’ve seen is any indicator but I sure as hell won’t be putting a deposit down any time soon.
Why has this got the Daily Mail (whose readers aren’t buying Jaguars, seeing as no one is buying Jaguars) so outraged that a man married to another man has put people who aren’t squarely - what, exactly? Jeremy Clarkson? Not how you’d market a glamorous car, is he. Some other white bloke? They could get their undeniably gorgeous Formula E driver Mitch Evans, perhaps but he’s Maori so I have the feeling people might not like that either.
Is it something to do with the way linking your identity strongly to your car correlates to aggression behind the wheel? Probably not. If we’re honest this is just fever pitch aggression that’s been being stoked by right-wing shills about anything they fancy for decades. People with absolutely no investment in a brand are furiously announcing themselves as racist misogynists to squawk about how this is such a mistake!!! A huge mistake!!!! That Jaguar will only regret!!!!
If a brand doesn’t take the option of stoically killing itself, unseen by the people who don’t care about it and have never considered purchasing from it, then that’s just disgraceful to them. This sort of overdeveloped hate mania used to be reserved for profit-churn US televangelists and the Daily Express but has now got so normalised people feel comfortable making homophobic slur merch to protest the idea they might be expected not to be hateful.
Compared to the embarrassing identity spectacle that is everything about the Cybertruck, Jaguar is not promising that its new car will be crossbow-proof or that it’s worth all the financial, mechanical and social grief because you have the chance to be supplicant to terrible men. It’s really honestly just saying it’s going to make some new cars and they’ll be expensive as hell, pitched at the same segments as I don’t know, the Met Gala or whatever.
It goes beyond the classic ‘I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me.’ Because obviously £120,000 cars directed at the ultra-luxury segment are not about the vast majority of us.
Nothing about this rebrand is about inclusion. It’s about exclusivity. About showing an extraordinary that suggests it is a prize status very few people can achieve. It is not about diversity and inclusion, it is about what is valued as glamorous. As rare, extraordinary, striking.
The images are not of normal people. It’s not like Jaguar headed down to their local community centre and said they were going to make an outreach wagon. The rebrand is not supposed to be about stuffy executives or motorbores or whoever any of these people imagine would make better models, it is supposed to be about imagining the most exclusive and incredible club you could be part of.
That the presence of women, black people and gay men in there would freak people out in an ultra-VIP section really says a lot about why it’s so fucking exhausting to be even anywhere near the fringes of this field. But people pleading it’s just reasonable to be racist because of marketing on Twitter or in newspaper columns is a level of comprehension disgrace that’s embarrassing and response-rage-inducing even this far into 2024.
Especially when what you’re being offered, falling into any of those groups, is an unreachable, exclusive life that very few people lead. And you’re not even allowed to see that without someone violently railing against it.
Oh, the moths thing - and the weakly linked science bit. According to scientists at the University of Exeter, white-blue coloured LED headlights make moths 80% more likely to behave erratically. That’s a real ecological problem, with moths already in trouble - just like we have a horribly real sociological one with anyone driven to act this way by a glimpse of something dazzling.
See you in a few weeks, with some news (and possibly more regular updates)
Hazel
x