Earthquake events like a Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) chief quitting come as huge shocks at the moment they’re announced, but the departure of CEO Thierry Bolloré “for personal reasons” has reportedly not been a complete surprise to some members of the British motor industry’s inner circle. There have been rumours for several months that something like this might happen.
The lingering suggestion has been that Bolloré hasn’t been getting on very well with his big bosses at Tata, on a number of counts. His “professorial” style of management is understood not to have gone down well with the senior management teams tasked with putting his brave Reimagine plan (to reorganise JLR and revive Jaguar) into practice. Big decisions, say the rumours, have been too slow in coming.
There are also suggestions that the Bolloré plan isn’t playing well with major suppliers who must invest huge sums to make it work. Rival company bigwigs are polite about one another in public — and, after all, Bolloré has had big jobs in the motor industry and knows it well — but there have been times when Autocar reporters have noticed a degree of eye-rolling from those in parallel jobs to Bolloré’s when the idea of re-founding Jaguar as a Bentley-rivalling EV brand has come up, let alone the part about having it ready to launch its first model in 2025.
But the biggest problem seems to be the group’s failure to take best financial advantage of the success of the Range Rover, its most distinguished product and highest earner. The launch of the latest iteration of the legendary flagship (and its high-earning Sport outrider) has not been well handled, globally speaking. Plans to launch a separate Range Rover division have so far failed to emerge. Worse, Land Rovers continue to languish near the bottom of world quality and reliability tables — a situation that depletes the company’s coffers even more than it harms its reputation.
It’s easy to imagine that the Covid hangover, the ongoing chip and component shortages, the impending global financial downturn and the growing anxiety of highly-invested dealers have made Bolloré’s job much harder than it was at the outset of his two-year tenure. It now seems quite likely that SS Reimagine has been holed below the water line. Worst of all, in the extensive JLR hierarchy there seems to be no natural successor to Bolloré, whose own recruitment took six months.
God speed, then, to Adrian Mardell, the JLR lifer and finance boss who has never previously been recognised as a car-guy or an industry leader, with his mission to pick up the pieces. Those who know call him a pragmatist and “a good bloke” but he probably isn’t the visionary leader this producer of charismatic vehicles needs to succeed. The next steps look daunting indeed.
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Bollore turned out to foretell what Mercedes recently stated it will do in discontinuing small and cheap cars. Problem is Jaguar is a bit player which makes it difficult to sell in volume and buy parts cheaply. Bollore was simply buying time for when people are prepared to pay Bentley prices for its almost bespoke products without waiting for supply chain issues to be resolved. Tata lost patience when seeing the Germans make record margins during pandemic. The xj project should be reinstated as long as it can find a partner to share the platform so that it can break even before ten years, a guess of how long it takes for Jaguar to sell the same number of xj what the 3series may sell in one year.
Killing off the nearly-finisahed XJ (and to a lesser extent J-Pace) was an unfathomably bizarre thing to do.
Sales and profots come from cars in showrooms, not renders of somthing that might or might not appear in 3-5 years time.
It may well finish off Jaguar as we know it.
But how on earth did JLR's owners allow these decisions to be made?
Unreal. How long have I commented on here that Bollore is the world's worst automotive CEO? And now Steve Cropley is reporting everybody in the industry knew already?
Steve, why didn't you say earlier when Jaguar could have been saved? Bollore killed off Jaguar and you let that go unreported!
Instead of walking Jaguar through a hybrid period, as every other marque seems to be doing, he decided to kill it dead. Left the I-Pace, once a leader, without updates to keep it fresh.
Yes, there's a chip shortage, but no other brand has been killed off because of it. They've all seemingly managed to work around it, mostly. Bollore claimed it would take many more years, others area saying mid-2023 for supplies to normalise. Who is right?
Steve, you've let us all down. Especially Jaguar employees.
After Arrival and Britishvolt, the next outfit to fold will be GMA, despite all the brown nosing by Autocar and others. Much like Bollore, Gordon Murray cuts a pretty sad figure these days, making proclamations that are completely divorced from any sort of reality.