Objects of Our Time: Jaguar Type 01

Engineered beyond the imagination, is this object of our time inciting a dystopian future, or does it shed light on the truth of today?

First thought: The parable of the Prodigal Son is most commonly understood as a story of repentance, second chances, and humility.

The younger son squanders his inheritance, then comes back and begs for forgiveness, but the older son is ambivalent when his father says they should celebrate because he has returned: “It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.” I think about this when I look at the new campaign of the Jaguar Type 01. Unlike its criticized campaign of its concept car in 2024, Jaguar is no longer focusing on an ideal or the people who might drive it, but on a four-door grand tourer with over 1,000 horsepower that’s actually meant to be driven. And so, I wonder, if the Prodigal Son might not be better understood here and in general as returning to your roots. They’re what gave you everything to begin with.

Second thought: It takes real chutzpah to reinvent yourself after everyone calls you a failure.

To get up and wipe the dirt off your knees and ignore the vultures hovering just overhead, hoping that you’ll fall on your face again and give them what they really came for—content, oh so scandalous content. At the unveiling of the new Type 01, the naysayers left satisfied. Not because Jaguar gave them memes or followed Beckett’s advice to “fail better,” but because they created something truly marvelous, with a drag coefficient of 0.23.

Third thought: When a painting or a poem is a masterpiece, every stroke, every line, every word serves a function.

Saint-Exupéry thought perfection arrives not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away. “Luxury doesn’t mean more materials,” Mary Crisp, Jaguar’s Chief Materiality Designer, told us. “It doesn’t mean more, more, more.” The Type 01 has no front door speakers, because a soundbar across the base of the windscreen made them redundant. Interior panels are wrapped in a single piece to avoid one extra seam. Adolf Loos called ornament a crime. Crisp might agree, but she puts it more diplomatically: they didn’t want to add decoration after decoration for the sake of it. They wanted to create a sense of balance. A masterpiece is about harmony.

Fourth thought: One of the hardest things to make is something that is both modern and timeless, because the first word is about now and the second is about never.

With its ultra-long bonnet, low roofline, and a sleek silhouette, the Type 01 recalls the grand tourers of the past but updates them with frameless doors, a glassless tailgate, and a camera feed where the rear-view mirror used to be. The trick, according to Alexey Andreev, Jaguar’s Exterior Design Lead, is proportion. And he reaches for the Manhattan skyline to explain it. The Empire State Building, he points out, is “a really old building, but the proportion still talks to you to this day.”

Fifth thought: In 1896, William James argued that some choices can’t wait for proof.

If we’re stranded on a mountain ledge, facing a gap we have to leap over, we have to believe we can make it, otherwise we fall to our death. For James, faith sometimes creates the very thing it believes in. I think about this idea when I look at the new Type 01 and consider the fact that this electric four-door vehicle is being called the “foundation of the brand.” Jaguar has already jumped. James’ pragmatism holds that an idea is not true or false in the abstract. It becomes true once it’s let loose in the world. And so, the comment sections shouldn’t influence us. We should decide on the road.

This is a dedicated feature in partnership with Jaguar.