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Happy New Jaguar Opinions Day! Personally, I think it looks terrific but who cares what I think? What's more interesting is how this car ended up like this and how long it's been in the making.

When they decided to do a hard reset on Jag, they tasked three competing teams with creating a new design language that would work across a range of different types of car. This led to a shoot out at which 18 full-size models were presented. That's a shitload of work.

One day, all 18 full-size models were gathered together and arranged here, in the viewing yard at the Gaydon studio. I've been in this yard. It's bloody massive.

And even this wasn't big enough to display everything. Some stuff had to be shown inside the main studio. Also bloody massive.

And from this day, a winning team was chosen and the Type 01 is the first production car to the chosen design language. I've asked Jag people if we'll ever see photos of all those competing models on display and the answer was a firm and disappointing, no. Bah!

I heard on the grapevine that the styling models from that massive shoot out were not immediately binned but stashed away in a JLR storage unit. Unfortunately, there was an incident at this place, quite a hot and flamey one, and many were damaged or destroyed.

They also went early on visually representative prototypes because the platform had such different proportions trying to make mules by stretching existing cars over the underparts was impossible. Hence the very thorough camo including the fake estate back on early test cars.

Anyway, TL;DR: The new Jag has been a long time coming. About six years, all told. I think out on the road with other traffic it's going to look brilliantly bonkers.