Jaguar Design Boss Wants Automaker To Build More Sports Cars

The new design director of Jaguar, Julian Thomson, wants the firm to start building more sports cars.

Just a few days ago, the facelifted Jaguar F-Type was presented to the world as the first new model launched under Thomson’s tenure. At this stage, however, the F-Type stands alone in the company’s range as its sole sports car.

“Jaguar will always build sports cars. I’d love to do more than one,” Thomson told Auto Express.

Thomson admits that sales of sports cars simply can’t rival those of more accessible vehicles, but does believe there could be a surge in popularity of driver-focused sports cars as more and more vehicles on the market become electric and feature more advanced self-driving systems, essentially taking owners out of the driving equation.

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“In this day and age of electrification and autonomous technology, a part of me thinks there may be a resurgence of people enjoying transportation for transportation’s sake and driving for driving’s sake,” he said. “Whether that makes the market bigger I don’t know, but I think there is a threat to volume production cars and they are going to struggle to find a position on what they do. I’d hope that truly special and luxury cars, sports cars, will find a place where they have the option to be more exotic.”

While Thomson failed to detail what kind of new sports cars he’d like Jaguar to create in the future, he did rule out the possibility of an all-electric hypercar asserting that huge amounts of power are not the answer.

“Cars like the Pininfarina [Battista] and Lotus [Evija] which have sheer amounts of power are not the answer,” he said. “You need to have something which you interact with and love and have that sense of connection with. I don’t think that can be done through sheer power.”