JAGUAR REVEALS E-PACE, THE CROSSOVER SUV FOR MILLENNIAL COUPLES

Crossover SUVs are the pop music of the car world: scorned by purists, liked by the masses, and disproportionately successful in terms of sales. Jaguar’s F-Pace is the perfect example of this trend, selling more than 80,000 sport utility vehicles after launching in 2016 and accounting for almost half of the company’s 172,848 cars sold in the last financial year. With such a runaway commercial success, it was inevitable that Jaguar would return for another bite at the cherry, and today it does so with the unveiling of the new E-Pace compact performance SUV. It’s a scaled-down F-Pace — in price, power, and size — but it’s still the same formula of giving the people what they really want.

I was in attendance at Jaguar’s London launch of the E-Pace, and one of the intriguing peripheral things about it was the press group assembled. The number of Chinese and Russian journalists was nearly equal to the English-speaking ones, signaling Jaguar’s emphasis on capturing the growing opportunity in those Eastern regions. The new E-Pace will initially be built in Graz, Austria, but starting next year it’ll also be manufactured in China specifically for the local Chinese market. Orders for the E-Pace open tonight with starting prices of $38,600, £28,500, or €34,950, and deliveries will be within six months
Jaguar design director Ian Callum explained today that “the thing with Jaguars is that they should always be exaggerated in some way to give that excitement.” He waxed poetic about the oversized paws of big cats and how they were evoked by the large air intakes at the front of the E-Pace. The front grille is the same as you’ll find on the Jaguar XF, and the headlights are, in Callum’s words, unashamedly derived from the F-Type. During its development, the E-Pace was codenamed “the cub” inside Jaguar, and many of its aesthetic cues are thus inherited from the elder, pricier siblings.

Jaguar defines the look of the E-Pace as “confident and assertive, but not aggressive.” Callum believes “Jags should never be aggressive.” That makes me wince a little, because I’ve only ever heard the term “Jag” in the context of tabloid journalism about spendthrift sports stars or perfidious politicians. This car brand’s reputation is thus a little uneven, but the approach with the E-Pace seems a good one: Jaguar’s offering a high standard of practicality wrapped up in a high standard of design and engineering.