Alleged Leaked Pics of Jaguar’s New Electric Vehicle Reveal a Car With No Rear Windshield

We live in an era of enshittified cars. Alleged concept art for Jaguar’s new electric vehicles has leaked online ahead of its reveal at Miami Art Week. The concept art teases a car much like other luxury brands on the bleeding edge. The pair of cars are ugly boxes in pastel colors with no rear windshield. If you need to see behind you, simply check a viewing screen in the car.

Pictures of Jaguar’s re-launch hit the Coche Spias forum earlier today. The concept art matches another picture Jaguar shared on its website teasing the new vehicle. On both the website and in the concept art, the car has no rear windshield. The ad copy says “Copy Nothing,” but the luxury car manufacturer has copied the lack of a rear windshield from EV rival Polestar.

The Volvo-owned company’s Polestar 4 and 5 don’t have rear windows. It makes the cars more aerodynamic but also cuts out a crucial line of sight while driving. To see behind them, drivers stare into a camera feed that sits where the rear-view mirror once was. Jaguar looks to be going the same way.

© Jaguar Concept art via Coche Spias.

I hate this feature. Forgive me. Maybe it’s the 30 years I spent on Dallas highways, but when you show me a luxury vehicle without a rear window all I see is a coffin. Car manufacturers have spent the last 20 years inserting electronics between the driver and functional analogue features. Giant touch screens have replaced tactical and easy-to-use buttons.

Tesla’s door handles don’t function if it gets too cold or there’s a glitch in the software. In its impressions video for the Polestar 4, Top Gear noted that the first one it took for a spin didn’t function right because of a glitch in its software. I look at these cars and I think of Angela Chao, a wealthy CEO, backing a Tesla into a pond and drowning, unable to roll down the electronically controlled windows, dead because she pushed the wrong button on a touchscreen.

Jaguar’s new electric-only vehicles look to be going all in on car enshittification. The luxury car brand has been having a hard time in the last few years. The manufacturer never sold a lot of cars, but it had a dedicated following of rich weirdos willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a bit of British luxury. That hasn’t been true in years. The company sold around 180,000 cars in 2018. In 2023 that number had fallen to 67,000.

© Jaguar Concept art via Coche Spias.

In 2021, Jaguar announced it was going all-electric. By 2025, it said, the storied manufacturer would only be making electric vehicles. Elon Musk has successfully turned EVs into a luxury item. Teslas and the Cybertruck are hideous, yes, but they’re also a sign of wealth. Jaguar wanted a piece of that.

It first teased its new vision in a 30-second ad spot on November 19. It featured a pastel-draped collection of beautiful models sauntering around a weird pink moonscape. In the grand tradition of luxury car ads, the Jaguar ad showed off no Jaguars. Critics latched on to this, as well as the ad’s use of a diverse group of models, and declared that the UK manufacturer had gone woke and would soon go broke.

The concept art is a boxy pastel nightmare. It looks like an electric vehicle attempting to remind people of American-made muscle cars of the past. They’re hideous, but they aren’t for me. They aren’t cars to aspire to. It’s not the kind of vehicle you pass on the road and yearn for, it’s a gaudy status symbol that reminds you the person inside has money. If Jaguar was chasing the feeling of the Tesla and Cybertruck, it nailed it.