Why Jaguar's Effort To Go Electric Has Been "Hugely Frustrating"

I’m an analyst and consultant by trade and one of the most frustrating things about my job, and why I now do it externally rather than working for a company as an employee, is the lack of understanding for what is and is not on the critical path to success. Jaguar’s new managing director recently was interviewed on why the move to electric cars was “hugely frustrating”, but for me, and this is true of most all of the electric car makers other than Tesla and those in China, is that no one modeled themselves after Tesla’s success.

I met with the then-Ford CEO around a decade ago and advised him they emulate Tesla, and I was laughed out of the room and a couple of years later he was let go. This doesn’t just happen with car companies Microsoft had the opportunity to come up with a better iPod and failed because they took a list of requirements, they developed themselves, and treated it like a list of options (and failed spectacularly).

Jaguar did field the I-Pace, and I was one of the launch analysts, fell in love with the car, and bought two of them myself. But, while it was the best car, at the time, I’d ever owned from a fun perspective, and I did love it, it lacked the parts that make Tesla’s broadly usable even though it was a far better-built vehicle.

I’ve been on Jaguar’s advisory board and had previously met with their prior head of manufacturing, but the company just didn’t seem to get what was needed to be successful, and they aren’t alone. I have a rule, which is if you can’t do something right, don’t do it, as doing it badly shouldn’t be an option, but most car companies take that unfortunate alternative path.

Here is why:

Finance

I’ve had a unique and varied career prior to becoming an industry analyst. I had positions in finance, marketing, operations, competitive analysis, internal audit, law enforcement, sales, and security. So, I know more than most how companies should work and can figure out where they are broken. What often happens with a new product is that the designers, often using focus groups (focus groups suck, I’ll get to that later), define a car and then they go for approvals.

Finance gets involved and typically cuts into this solution and cost reduces it, to a point where the result looks little like the concept that has been used in Focus groups and automotive events, leading to a disappointing solution.

Then marketing gets the product and tries to convince buyers that it isn’t the train wreck it has become, and sales tries to move the product. This is a horribly backward process.

Marketing should define the product because they have the data on what the market wants, finance should be part of the process, so they understand that the price point that marketing has defined is achievable. (you may ask why marketing and not sales, the reason is that sales operates too tactically and in the present so it is unlikely they can contribute to the effort this early and it would detract from their ability to sell a current product, you don’t want them focused on something years out. You want them to sell what you have).

Now design gets involved and, along with marketing, creates a product which has already been blessed by finance). This is how the iPhone and iPad were created with Steve Jobs performing the marketing role, and how Tesla was created with Musk in Jobs’ position. I do think that whoever does this marketing role needs to have the authority of the CEO backing them to assure the outcome because we’ve seen this work.

Tesla

What made Tesla work, beyond doing the above, is the complete solution which included initially both a charging network and extraordinary customer care (which builds advocacy because up until recently Tesla didn’t do traditional marketing). In China, the government aggressively addressed the charging network problem but only Tesla came up with its own, initially free, charging network which made a massive difference and, even today, the Tesla charging network is better run and operated (well it was before Musk fired the team behind it) than any other company.

I firmly believe that, without that charging network, no car company is going to be very successful with electric cars. So, they either needed to build one or wait until the infrastructure was in place before entering the electric car market which is what appears to have happened in China and why electric cars are vastly more popular there.

Wrapping Up:

Jaguar’s problem is they didn’t do their own charging network, and they then tried to pivot to full electrics before the charging networks were ready. In addition, they prematurely killed off their gas cars leaving their dealers with little or nothing to sell and customers that don’t want to buy obsolete new cars. If we were to use a shooting metaphor, rather than ready, aim, shoot, they just shot and that always ends badly.

So, I get why Jaguar is frustrated, me too, but because Jaguar didn’t properly define or adhere to the critical path for success and they are hardly alone, I expect, by the end of the decade a large number of old and well-established car companies will fail (Hyundai being a clear exception). Largely because they shot before aiming, now are pulling back from electrics, right before the largest impediment to buying them will be fixed.

And should China find a way around its sanctions, or should those sanctions be dropped, that country is likely to dominate the post-gas care auto market by 2023 unless something dramatically changes.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst covering automotive technology and battery developments at Torque News. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia, and follow his articles on Forbes, on X, and LinkedIn.