Goodbye Jaguar I-Pace: Last drive in an EV game-changer

When Jaguar launched the I-Pace back in 2018, with lots of hoopla at a launch event at the then healthy Geneva motor show, the British nation’s collective chest swelled with pride.

However, it was a controlled kind of chest swelling, not quite on the level of the Rule Britannia, front-page excitement that greeted the BMC Mini back in 1959, the Jaguar XJ in 1968 or the original Range Rover in 1970.

By 2018, in many people’s view, premium cars had already been evil for decades.

Still, this was Britain’s first significant electric car, it was a Jaguar and best of all it was a rare example of us beating the top German makers to the punch – something the I-Pace’s two biggest advocates, Sir Ralf Speth (JLR’s ex-BMW CEO, a consummate engineer) and Sir Ratan Tata (the long-time Jaguar-loving head of JLR’s Indian owner, Tata) valued enormously.

Better yet, the I-Pace went down really well with everyone else who counted: the car testing community loved the way it looked and drove, owners enjoyed seeing their brand doing something progressive and corporate/financial denizens saw this as a plausible route for Jaguar to take towards a profitable future.

Profits had been elusive for the Leaping Cat since founder Sir William Lyons led the company – and he departed the top job in 1972.

Despite the I-Pace’s unhelpful height, short nose and cab-forward design (all very foreign proportions in Jaguar history), design chief Ian Callum and his team brilliantly adapted Jaguar’s bumps, curves and an extreme windscreen rake to the new proportions and created a car that seemed (and still seems) almost too sleek to be called an SUV/crossover, although its spacious cabin and boot clearly showed that it did indeed belong to that generic group.

The I-Pace immediately set about collecting global awards – 62 in all, including Car of the Year – like they were going out of fashion, and the company did a lot of initial boasting about them.

The presumption was that the basic I-Pace, helped with judicious updates as battery tech advanced, would last a couple of generations, like other new cars: 12 to 14 years for the major underbits with a pause halfway for a reskin and mid-cycle refreshes to punctuate progress every three years or so.

When in 2021 new JLR CEO Thierry Bolloré launched his all-bets-are-off Reimagine plan to rebuild Jaguar as an all-EV company by 2025, the I-Pace was slated as a survivor, a model to build a bridge between the old and new. 

Yet here it is in 2024, gone already. At first the demise was a bit of a shock, although perhaps not too huge a bombshell, because upheaval and rapid mind-changing have been an integral to British car-making as far back as you care to look.

Yet with the kill-it-now decision went pangs of regret that made us want to drive a few more enjoyable I-Pace miles, at least for the purpose of this story.

Helpfully, Jaguar still had prime examples on its test fleet. We decided on an enjoyable 10-day reverie.

On reflection, the I-Pace’s demise should have been easier to predict than we made it. When Bolloré suddenly walked away from the CEO job, the fact that they drafted in the finance director, Adrian Mardell, to lead the company suggested pretty clearly that earning power at Jaguar was the problem.

The I-Pace and its small SUV sibling, the E-Pace, were both being built in Austria by versatile but pricey contract constructor Magna Steyr, with the former using a battery pack that had to be imported from Poland and powered by own-design Jaguar motors that may have been technically brilliant but were far from the cheapest available.

What’s more, despite the I-Pace’s high reputation, sales have never taken off. In the best years (2019 and 2020), combined American and European deals amounted to around 15,000 annually, and in more recent years volume has fallen below a third of that, not only affected by the malaise in general EV demand but by other matters too.

The high entry price was a factor, as were regular software glitches, the fact that realistic battery range originally quoted at 292 miles was more like 70% of that (the US’s EPA even cut the officially quoted range figure) and increasingly stiff and low-priced competition from the Chinese, Germans and Koreans.

It’s usually deemed to be an advantage to be first into a new market, but in the I-Pace’s case it made things hard. So hard, in fact, that Jaguar has chosen to kill the car now and go through 2025 with only the dregs of Magna Steyr production in the pipeline to sell as dealers await 2026 production of the first of three forthcoming models, a four-door GT in the Porsche Taycan mould. And yet…

When our I-Pace test car arrived, it was a really nice surprise. I hadn’t been in one for a few years, since running a mid-range version as a long-term test car for several months back in 2019.

Despite its bulk and height, the car still looked stylish and special, with full, curvaceous surfacing and faint but obvious hints of the D-Type’s lines in its handsome haunches.

The interior, making generous use of the Alcantara, was plush and comfortable. Best of all, there was none of the anonymous blackness that blights many Germanic interiors.

The materials in this car were light enough to make their quality obvious. The rear compartment (for all the fastback styling) was spacious and offered lots of head room. The boot was very long as well as very deep.

There are clear missteps, though. Visually, the cab-forward design denies the car an imposingly long nose – something Jaguar traditionalists have long seen as de rigueur. Same for a low boot deck. Fascinatingly, this is a feature the latest, post-Callum and Julian Thomson design regime at Jaguar, led by renowned Land Rover guru Gerry McGovern, is understood to be bringing back to the 2026 range.

The I-Pace, spoken of in its early life as a ‘sports crossover’, also has an unashamedly high seating position (blame six inches of battery-pack thickness under the floor), plus a front door pillar that compromises leg and foot access more than it would in a low-slung saloon.

Third, there’s no view of bonnet bulges to stir the enthusiast’s soul. Try denying that sight to the owner of an E-Type, or even a relatively recent XJ, and see how you get on.

Still, when you’re settled in the superbly shaped driver’s seat, such criticisms float away. You can see very well from the elevated driving position (despite windscreen pillars like tree trunks) and the controls are universally pleasing to the touch.

This HSE-trim car is one of those premium models that sets you wondering why anyone could want anything plusher. And some of its controls, notably the circular PRND twist selector that we criticised early on, have become so ubiquitous in many models that we’ve grown used to them and now accept their practicality.

The promise of the I-Pace’s power and torque seemed massive in 2018 and they remain potent today: 394bhp and 516lb ft from two permanent magnet synchronous motors in a hefty 2300kg package yield easy-to-deploy 4.8sec 0-62mph acceleration, plus a less impressive 125mph top speed.

But on longer journeys, you soon learn that the most modern I-Pace still can’t duck its range issues: our late-spec test car was really only comfortable delivering a bit over 200 miles. Rivals do much better.

Quite unusual to the Jaguar experience, for regulars, is the effect this car’s proportions have on the driving. Higher than combustion-engined equivalents and 4.7 metres long, the I-Pace sits on a 2.9-metre wheelbase, which means that while it’s only a whisker longer than the XE compact saloon, its front and rear axles are a full 30mm farther apart of those of the bulky XF saloon.

Which is another way of saying the front and rear overhangs are short and the major masses, set low in the car, are well centralised. Chuck in four-wheel drive and you can see why this is a car that’s never going to drift anywhere this side of a skating rink.

That said, when you’re ambling, the rear 197bhp motor does most of the driving and the front 197bhp motor (converted for the purpose to a generator) does most of the regenerative braking.

Neutrality, understandably, is the I-Pace’s main cornering characteristic and it’s delivered with very little body roll. Disconnecting the stability control is a fatuous exercise.

Far better to enjoy the car’s steering precision – still much better than most EVs at any price. It lets you place the car accurately and enjoy the I-Pace’s easy ability to change direction. Grip is great. Modest throttle steering is still available (easing the power lessens the front slip angles), but it’s far from dramatic.

In early testing, we weren’t especially nice about the I-Pace’s ride quality, noticing a tendency of its heavy body to heave against the usually decent damping on quick, high-amplitude surfaces like the Fosse Way.

Then others came along to show how difficult it is to control 2.3-tonne EVs on such roads, doing it far worse. As a result, we find that the six-year-old I-Pace is still one of the best EVs you can buy, dynamically speaking, and owners confirm that.

On such grounds, it’s a shame that the I-Pace is dying. At least my own several recent sojourns to Jaguar dealer used car line-ups confirm that good warranted I-Paces are available at what seem very affordable prices.

What has the I-Pace achieved? It could be that if the next Jaguar generation is successful (and given McGovern’s magic touch with the Range Rover, that’s a strong possibility), the first-ever electric Leaping Cat may come to be seen as a blind alley, a car whose proportions sent it down the wrong road. Having said that, nobody at Jaguar regrets the I-Pace experience or is ever likely to.

As managing director Rawdon Glover told Autocar in a recent interview, the I-Pace was needed to put Jaguar on its current path. Let’s hope, for the sake of a wonderful marque, that it’s now the right one. 

How they built the I-Pace

The ending of I-Pace production at Magna Steyr in Graz ends a fascinating episode in Jaguar manufacturing history. The Austrian operation is a 90-year-old car production offshoot of Canadian car components giant Magna International, which has 400 outposts in 29 countries. Car making accounts for just 10% of its $40 billion annual turnover. 

The Graz business is well known for its flexibility with high levels of quality: the I-Pace first had its all-aluminium body made in a highly mechanised body-in-white plant – featuring 87 robots and 84 rivet guns – and then shared a similarly robotised final assembly line with the E-Pace SUV.

Observed several years ago by Autocar, this was surely the one and only time in Jaguar history when an £80k, all-aluminium dual-motor EV shared a production track with a £50k, steel-bodied, ICE-powered SUV.

When we visited and remarked on the fact, Magna Steyr bosses viewed it as nothing special. In a successful year, they build as many as 200,000 cars of up to half a dozen models.

They’d had five different models on one line, they told us. “It’s not so special,” the foreman said. “It’s what we do. The challenge is getting the quality right.”

How important is a nose job?

Since it was revealed several months ago that, rather than continuing with a short-nose, cab-forward look, the new Jaguars of 2026 will have longer, more prominent nose treatments, Jaguar aficionados have been encouraged by the idea.

Jaguar MD Rawdon Glover seemed to confirm the fact in a recent interview, suggesting that cab-forward design was a characteristic that was being adopted by “practically everyone” and some of the current generic crop looked “as if they’d spent too long in a wind tunnel”.

Sir William Lyons, who as well as founding the Jaguar company and managing it through its formative years had much to do with the styling of its greatest cars, always laid great stress on frontal styling and was acknowledged to be “better at fronts than backs”.

It seems that while striving famously to be “a copy of nothing”, Gerry McGovern’s team may have been influenced, at least in general terms, by Lyons and his team. 

It’s even possible that a cab-forward theme, as well as leading the I-Pace to an early grave, might have done the same for the 2020 XJ EV that was killed by Bolloré and co.

Perhaps we will never know. But various Jaguar high-ups have suggested that the limo “didn’t go the way we’ve now chosen”. Perhaps proportions were a major reason.