Good morning! I trust your Christmas was a great one. Today is Dec. 26, 2025.
Before I begin, I want to take a moment and publicly thank Athena Thorne for creating the graphics for my columns of Christmas eve and Christmas day. Beautiful work, and I’m grateful. They each fit the columns' subjects wonderfully.
Today in history
1868: U.S. President Andrew Johnson grants an unconditional pardon to all persons involved in the Civil War.
1896: John Philip Sousa composes the patriotic march "The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
1991: Mikhail Gorbachev formally resigns as President of the USSR in a televised speech.
Birthdays today include Clara Barton, filmmaker Charles Pathé, Louis Chevrolet, Humphrey Bogart, Cab Calloway, Anwar Sadat, Rod Serling, and O’Kelly Isley of the Isley Brothers.
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Sad note from the Daily Mail:
Jaguar's last ever petrol car came off the assembly line at the brand's Midlands factory on Friday (19 December) ahead of its daring switch to all-electric vehicles next year.
The final Jaguar model with a combustion engine under its bonnet is an £80,000 high-performance F-Pace SVR SUV finished in black paint, according to the Jaguar Enthusiasts' Club, which was in attendance as the Solihull factory officially signed off its last petrol model.
Under the bonnet is a burbling 5.0-litre supercharged V8 petrol engine - a stark contrast to the first 'new Jaguar' that will debut next year, which is a near-silent four-door GT that will cost almost twice as much, with a quoted £120,000 to £140,000 starting price.
While parent group JLR made no official announcement of the event, the Jaguar Enthusiasts' Club says the final model is being gifted to the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust in Gaydon, where it will be retained as a museum piece.
The club said Friday was a 'quiet, historic full stop' for Jaguar's 90-year relationship with the internal combustion engine.
The big cheese at Jaguar, Adrian Mardell, left hurriedly in July and was replaced by PB Balaji, a board member from the Indian firm Tata, the new owners of Jag. This was immediately followed by the resignation of Jag’s design chief, Gerry McGovern.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it: This is going to be the death knell for Jaguar.
Leaving aside the well-known reliability issues with Jaguar that have been a serious problem for well over a decade (the S-Type being a good example), everyone else in the auto industry is reversing course from their well-publicized moves toward EVs. Ford and GM, obviously, but also Volvo and Mercedes-Benz have reversed their much-ballyhooed decision to go all EV. This, after writing off literally billions of dollars to the government-driven, futile efforts to adapt to electric vehicles. (I won't even mention Chrysler/Stelantis, which fields what is likely the only brand with bigger reliability issues than Jaguar, even without the shift to EV's.)
Obviously, all these huge companies see disaster down that road. Jag doesn’t, and it will, I think, pay the price for that lack of foresight. I wrote about the question of EVs just recently, in which I raised the practicality problems in general from the driver's perspective. One commenter on that column expressed it this way:
Toyota's CEO has been warning for some time that EVs are not the future. He has cited the fact that there is not enough generating capacity in the U.S. to convert the entire fleet to EV's, there isn't enough lithium being mined to build them, and there are not remotely enough charging stations for even a 25% share of all vehicles. He also said late last year that the majority of those in the auto industry know that, but because of the political aspects, they are silent about it.
Drive Magazine Motor Expert Trent Nikolic went on Sky News in Australia to call Jaguar’s move a “huge gamble.”It's worse than a big gamble. It's like going "all in" when all you've got is a pair of twos.
The central part of Nikolic’s analysis is that it comes down to sales. Jag has always been at the high end on price, thereby limiting its prospective sales to people who don't worry about money. The people with enough money to toss into the fire have, for a long while, been Jag’s only customers. These new models replacing the Internal combustion powered models will be priced even higher, by some reports going into the $300,000 range.
Higher price tags are the reason Jag has always been a niche buy. So, too, will the EV design itself be, regardless of who makes a car. It took the removal of the EV subsidy here in the States for carmakers to recognize that, comparatively speaking, nobody outside of the rich is buying the things. So, Jag faces a double whammy. Its unit sales will obviously fall, affected by this further narrowing of its target audience.
In my view, this amounts to politically driven corporate suicide.
(Shrug) You make your choices, you place your bets. I suppose you could say that Tata is doing that. I regard it as massive, obstinate stupidity. The EV has always been a solution in search of a problem. Jaguar tries to position itself as trendy (hence the “I-” in front of whatever the car name is, the I-Pace, for example). It apparently identified a group of folks with lots of money who are easily influenced by the latest shiny object. Then again, this is what the free market is all about — finding your niche.
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Well, good luck to Jaguar. It’s going to need it. This move has Tata exposing the historic Jaguar brand to a certain downturn and, possibly (I think likely), its total obliteration.
Thought of the day: You will be amazed at how often your greatest trials, given time, will become your greatest strengths.
I'll see you here tomorrow.
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