Goodbye Jaguar I-Pace: last ride in an EV gamechanger

The assumption was that the base I-Pace, helped with sensible updates as battery technology became more advanced, would last a few generations like other new cars: 12 to 14 years for the big underbits with a break halfway through for a reskin and halfway through the cycle. is renewed every three years to underline progress.

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

But here it is in 2024, already over. At first the demise was a bit of a shock, although perhaps not too much of a bombshell, as unrest and rapid changes in minds have been an integral part of British car production as far back as you care to look.

But with the kill-it-now decision came feelings of regret that prompted us to put in a few more enjoyable I-Pace miles, at least for the purpose of this story.

Fortunately, Jaguar still had excellent examples in its test fleet. We decided on an enjoyable 10-day reverie.

On second thought, the I-Pace’s demise should have been easier to predict than we made it happen. When Bolloré suddenly stepped down from the CEO position, the fact that they had appointed the chief financial officer, Adrian Mardell, to run the company suggested quite clearly that earning power at Jaguar was the problem.

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

Moreover, despite the I-Pace’s good reputation, sales never took off. In the best years (2019 and 2020), combined US and European deals were around 15,000 per year, and in more recent years the volume has fallen below a third of that, driven not only by the slump in overall EV demand, but also because of other things. .

The high entry price played a role, as did the regular software issues, the fact that the realistic battery range originally stated at 472 miles was about 70% of that (the US EPA even lowered the officially stated range figure) and became increasingly stiff and lower. priced competition from the Chinese, Germans and Koreans.