Jaguar XE Estate & Coupe “…a very difficult business case”

It’ll be tough to extend the Jaguar XE Range in to an Estate & Coupe

We’ve banged on for years about Jaguar extending their saloon car range (well, the XJ and XF as that’s all they had until the XE arrived) to coupes and estates, at the very least. We know, for example, that the Jaguar XJ Coupe has been on the drawing board for as long as the current XJ, but Jaguar has failed to build it. Similarly, there have been rumblings about an XF Coupe for years, but that has come to nought too, although Jaguar did finally manage to launch the XF Sportbrake Estate to extend the XF range a little.

But now with a new car – the Jaguar XE – that should, if it’s to compete with BMW, Mercedes and Audi, offer the same sort of range as the Germans do (including Estate, Coupe and Convertible) it seems there may not be a business case in Jaguar’s eyes.

Ian Callum, Jaguar’s design boss, has told Australia’s Car Advice that he already knows what the variants of the XE will look like, but making a business case for them is much tougher than designing them.

Callum said that Jaguar’s much lower volumes than those enjoyed by BMW and Mercedes make it a tough call, and runs the risk of simply plagiarising sales from the Jaguar XE saloon rather than adding sales. Callum believes they’d have to be sure of additional sales of an XE Coupe of an extra 25,000 units a year to make it viable.

All of which may be true, but it still seems certain – however tough a business case it may be – that Jaguar will at least travel the Estate and Coupe route for the new XE, but probably not until after they launch a production version of the C-X17 SUV/Crossover in a year or so’s time, a car that is effectively an SUV/Crossover version of the new XE.

By Cars UK