Review: The Jaguar Type 01 Is Less a Car and More a Territorial Dispute
Gary Opinions test drives the new 5.2-metre luxury EV that comes with no rear window and requires its own dedicated postcode just to parallel park.
The new Jaguar Type 01 is a £130,000 landmass you can occasionally steer. It measures over 5.2 metres long and lacks a rear window entirely. The front bumper practically needs its own postcode.
Driving it presents a unique challenge. I am a motoring journalist used to sensible hatchbacks and things that look like angry electric razors. You don’t really park the Type 01. You abandon the vehicle across three distinct counties. Then you walk away hoping the council registers it as a new piece of brutalist civic architecture.
Supermarkets highlight the sheer geometry of the thing. I drove to the Tesco Extra on Thursday morning. The front wheels entered a standard parking bay. The rear wheels stayed out in another time zone. Local geometry enthusiast Arthur Pendelton was standing there with a tape measure trying to figure out how a single object could block a zebra crossing and a bakery at the same time. “I have been measuring it for three days,” he said. “The maths simply do not work.”
“Wealthy buyers expect a car that doubles as a modest territorial expansion.”
The view from the driver’s seat makes things worse. Without a rear window, you just have to commit to forward momentum. Looking back is impossible. I found it easiest to assume the road behind me had ceased to exist. This worked fine until I heard the muffled crunch of four municipal wheelie bins under the chassis. They were the green recycling ones.
Driving forward brings its own geographical challenges. I passed through a quaint Cotswold hamlet on Tuesday afternoon. The vehicle became perfectly wedged between a post office and a pub. Baffled residents spent the next three hours walking through the rear passenger doors just to cross the street. It functioned as a very expensive indoor shopping arcade.
Industry experts treat these dimensions as a feature. Automotive scale analyst Dr Penelope Crankshaft says wealthy buyers expect a car that doubles as a modest territorial expansion. She recommends owners declare the back half of the vehicle a sovereign micro-nation. That neatly sidesteps local parking enforcement. The boot alone has a larger GDP than Tuvalu.
Charging the battery requires serious logistical planning. I pulled up near a public station. The sheer length of the chassis meant routing the heavy cable through a thick laurel hedge and straight into the kitchen window of a pensioner named Brenda. Brenda was very accommodating. She asked if the car was staying for dinner. It was currently blocking all the afternoon sun from her patio.
So you end up owning an object that is slightly too big for the geography it occupies. You’ll buy it if you have the money and a driveway that stretches into the middle distance. Everyone else will just encounter it as a sleek, impassable roadblock on the way to the shops.