This 1935 SS 1 Airline Is the Ghost of Jaguar's Past, What the Brand Refresh Left Behind

But all I said to the contrary is that thanks to being behind the curve on their old-school brand image, mostly owed to a legacy of roaring V8s and V12s, meant that Jaguar needed to do SOMETHING to not be up you-know-what's creek when the time came to fully electrify.

Still, people make light-hearted teases at me for giving even an ounce of grace to a brand re-organization that failed so spectacularly that people thought it was a parody at first. So, like many an internet dingus before me, I will now last out at my detractors, dig my heels in the dirt, and make even more content out of the situation. But to the point, if you want to understand the origin of this vitriol, the genesis of a Jaguar brand of styling that people to this day hold with reverence, look no further than this year's Heritage Invitational.

Live from the Ten Tenths Motor Club, the world's newest VIP private racing venue, a collection of some of the finest automobiles in all of North Carolina gathered outside of turns three and four of Charlotte Motor Speedway. Among what must have been over a billion dollars worth of ultra-rare iron, a 1935 SS 1 Airline Saloon stands out as the most striking. Perhaps not necessarily because of how fast it can go or even because of how it itself looks. It's because, from the rib of this car, the Jaguar design language we all adore was more or less set in stone.

Let's paint the picture for you. It's the early-to-mid 1930s. In the English Northwest seaside town of Blackpool, two sweaty men named both named William, oddly, have spent the last decade building motorcycle sidecars and even dabbled in building sports cars. Being both British and conceived during the Great Depression, the whole operation was a little confusing. Their operation consisted of a few different trading names and various companies working together, ultimately merging into a melting pot of intellectual minds in engineering.

The first among them was the Swallow Sidecar and Coachbuilding Company, makers of hand-built bodies for production cars and sidecars for motorcycles from other OEMs. Taking up shop in Coventry in the West Midlands, these two Blackpudlians developed a very specific formula for building plush English sports cars and grand tourers cars.I.e., either plush and heavy or light and nimble bodies paired with acres of wood and leather inside, often paired with a drop-top. Along with contemporaries like Aston Martin, AC, Bentley, and MG, small and plucky firms across the United Kingdom wrote the formula that Jaguar only recently confined to history.

It's this crucible of exuberant driving, sleek, striking styling lines, and moderate-sized engines in proportion to their wheelbases that gave birth to this SS 1 Airline. It comes from the fifth of six model years the vehicle was manufactured during the inter-war period. Admittedly, SS cars were more or less geared towards being relatively affordable, comfortable cruisers than performance cars.

That's reflected in the roughly 2.6-liter, roughly 70-horsepower, six-cylinder side-valve engine that came in 1935 and '36 examples of this ultra-rare runabout. It's not complete as far as a brand identity yet. But what we have here is a framework by which all future Jaguars would one day be designed.

Jim and Lisa Hendrix, the proud owners of this rig, of which less than 20 are still around, took great care to preserve as much of that proto-Jaguar essence from an exciting primordial time for the company. Thank goodness for them. As my original point said, there's no better way to understand why Jaguar is in the position they are now than they are now than to look at what they were up to almost 90 years ago. In the years that followed this car, the SS changed its name to Jaguar in 1945.

Then, they'd cut their teeth in auto racing across the globe, develop a line of V12s that were the toast of the industry, and refine those original SS attributes into a design language unique to Jaguar. Through 40s and 50s icons like the XK120 and heartthrobs of the '60s ultra-beautiful E-Type, and the XJSs later on, the same flair for stately, stylish looks that gave Jag a Bond baddie aesthetic to the Aston Martin's 007 defined the company.

Even in the turbulent years of the 70s through the 90s, this dedication to heritage still shined through. It's all this, decades of the same basic form factor developed to its ultimate form, that made Jaguar one of the most loveable automotive brands that still survive today.

All of this is what Jag essentially threw in the toilet by rejecting its past in favor of an all-new, likely all-electric future. Now, with no production cars in the works that we know of, plus tariffs looming, it's starting to feel like abandoning the past started by this SS 1 was a major miscalculation. Not that Jaguar could rest on their laurels of the same basic formula forever. As I said in my last editorial about Jaguar, the impending EV revolution we all thought was coming before 2025 necessitated some kind of change. Lest their fan base be revolted by the typical Jaguar formula "spoiled" by electric motors.

Never mind that Jaguar's toyed around with PHEVs and BEVs for over a decade now. By eliminating nearly every genetic tie that Jaguar still had to its SS roots, the very essence of why people love Jag cars is sort of lost in translation nowadays. In truth, the Jaguar brand today essentially exists as a void in the market. With only the Type 00 concept to judge the refresh on thus far, so far, people have judged it extremely harshly. These thoughts circled in my head as I paced around this nine-decade-old piece of British motoring history.

One could only imagine what the two Williams who founded the company all those years ago would think about what their brand turned out to be. Of course, electric vehicles as a concept fell out of favor for the better part of the next century, right around the time Jag's primordial founding companies opened their doors. Now, they're still slated to be most folks' personal transportation pretty soon. Even if global mandates to force OEMs in Europe and the US have since been halted. With that in mind, Jaguar crashed and burned in regards to a brand refresh they unfortunately needed to undertake.

Could it really have killed Jaguar to keep just a little bit more of that primordial SS essence when they decided it was time to make a change? Simply taking a similar long, flowing hood with no V12 underneath it, fittig a general GT-style body, and fitting some electric motors under the skin isn't cutting it. There just isn't the same sense of originality, of purpose, of sheer engineering pashion that made Jaguar the go-to British sports car brand. The new Jaguar is a derivative, poorly thought out, attempt to blend a small portion of the same Jaguar formula and apply it the Apple and Tesla-dominated world of 2025. Certainly, it's more of that than it is a genuine act to change for the better. The more you think about it, the more it doesn't make sense.

I can't recall another time a legacy automaker made such a drastic change and lived to tell the tale very long. I really hope Jag is different because ten minutes up close and personal with one of the originals reminded me of what's so great about them. Their vibe is one that can't be repeated by other automakers, that even includes Jaguar themselves nowadays. It's a real shame.