The original Jaguar F-Type was one of the best looking cars ever produced. Back in 2014 it was brutish, bold, elegant, and well-proportioned. It was also restrained. Restrained, not in a negative way, but restrained in a way of knowing when enough is enough, thus avoiding overcomplication.
The F-Type convertible possessed a measured face, which was pinched and sculpted in all the right places. Its whole body seems to shimmer with this effortless tautness. The car looks tough, but is relatively modest in both length and width, which prevents it from looking overly masculine. Its brooding, but traditionally good looking. The spider’s best feature is the rear deck, under which the convertible roof is stored.
With the roof up or down, the rear deck dutifully fulfils its role of maintaining the almost surfboard flatness of the F-Type’s side profile. This deck, combined with a reverse shark-nose tail gives the Jaguar this sweet and simple rear end.
Then came the coupe. Now, the F-Type coupe is not a bad looking car at all. Jaguar must be given credit for tying the design together so well. Cars that start life as convertibles can sometimes struggle when reconfigured into coupes, and vice versa, but the F-Type’s genes are strong.
Unfortunately, in gaining a roof, the F-Type lost that glorious understated rear deck, and as such, its visual balance.
The rear of the coupe, no matter how well-resolved, simply cannot match the spider’s. The shape of the F-Type’s body below the sill prevents a Kamm tail, and as such, the coupe’s rear end is a convergence of metal and glass, and ends up looking compressed and visually busy. The haunches blend into the descending c-pillars and the boot is pinched at the rear, but the car looks heavy. It doesn’t look so fleet-footed, and the adrenal hit experienced when looking at the spider diminishes into sullen subjugation. You get what you see. There is nothing left to the imagination.
Then came the facelift, and things got worse.
Remember when we said that one of the F-Type’s key features was restraint? The facelift is case in point of ignoring that.
The offending item on the facelift was the addition of body colour trim pieces on the bottom of the front and rear bumpers, alongside some chunky sideskirts. All these achieved was to make the F-Type look even heavier. The agile aesthetic of the original car was replaced with stodginess on every surface. No longer do we get svelte bodywork, then necessary trim, and then the visual ceases. No, we got another painted part of bodywork below the trim which seems to say, “hey, there’s still some car down here, check it out!”, yet all it does is ruin the subtle visual journey, and make you realise how big the F-Type really is. All the subtlety of the 2014 car is lost. The muscularity gives way to flab, and the F-Type is barely the same car.
And then, when it couldn’t get any worse, we get the proper facelift. Jaguar’s new design language carelessly spliced onto the now coupe-only body that remains almost entirely unchanged. The new front end feature’s delicate swooping lights simply do not suit the F-Types muscular lines, and the thinner rear lights do not change the rear enough. As a result, the car looks like one quarter of one car, and three quarters of an entirely different one.
It looks bad full stop.
If the subdued front fascia design was applied to the whole body, and some creases were ironed out and the edges rounded, then we could have a reinvented, sophisticated Jaguar. Perhaps a car that could be the 2020s equivalent of the Aston Martin DB9, but instead we have been given a botched facelift, and a car that has only gotten uglier.
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