Jaguar hatch to launch in 2014

Jaguar is working on a dramatically styled five-door sports hatch featuring lightweight alloy bodywork and new, direct-injection V6 petrol engines.

Priced from £40k, the compact five-door is pencilled in for production around 2014, when it will line up alongside a new front-engined sports car and an estate version of the XF as extensions to Jaguar’s model line-up.

Intended as a luxurious but practical five-seater combining excellent fuel economy with good performance and handling, the sports hatch still awaits the production go-ahead, but is being championed at the highest levels of the company.

Concept reborn

The inspiration for Jaguar’s new model is the influential R-D6 hatch first shown at the 2003 Frankfurt motor show. That concept broke Jaguar out of its saloon/sports car design straitjacket, but it never advanced past the ‘nice idea’ stage because the company had other production priorities.

Now that Jaguar has a more solid product line-up and is forging an independent future under Indian owner Tata, the sports hatch is a very serious contender for production.

“There’s a growing feeling with the R-D6 that we really had something very innovative, fresh and different,” a source told Autocar. “Maybe we missed something back then, but the idea is even more applicable now.”

With a compact footprint and lightweight alloy body architecture, the sports hatch, dubbed R-D7 by one insider, would also take a major role in reducing Jaguar’s average fleet output of CO2, which has to hit 130g/km by 2015.

Premium positioning

Jaguar’s new model definitely won’t be a ‘cheap’ small car, because the company knows it can never match the production volumes of rivals Audi and BMW. So prices are likely to straddle the middle of the XF range, even though it will be smaller.

The choice of an aluminium body and understructure will push the price up, too, but that fits with the company’s ambitions to move upmarket. And Jaguar will also make sure that the sports hatch won’t suffer the stigma of its previous small car, the X-type, which became too many people’s last Jaguar, rather than their first, as initially planned.

Alloy bodywork

Under the skin, the sports hatch is likely to be planned as part of the next-generation XK sports car and its spin-off, the entry-level XE Porsche Boxster rival. However, the sports hatch could be a version of the XJ and the XF, which looks increasing likely to switch to alloy construction for their next generations.

Tata boss Ratan Tata is said to be a very strong advocate of alloy body construction, a technology that he sees as a vital competitive edge. By sharing with other models, Jaguar will save development and tooling costs, particularly on crash engineering, package design, the electrical system and interior structure.