"...and it goes backwards, Debbie. On purpose. There's a whole gear for it," whispered the youngest member of the SnarkWire Doom Desk on Thursday. He slid a Jaguar brochure across my desk like a margin call.
The car is the Type 01, the electric model Jaguar has just unveiled two years after its rebrand went down badly. The market saw a sleek comeback. I saw a luxury brand admitting, in print, that it has a plan for retreat.
Our twenty-six analysts spent the morning modelling the reverse gear. (Nobody slept. Nobody will.) Their verdict was unanimous. A company does not engineer the ability to back up unless it expects to be backed into a corner. That is not a feature. It is a confession.
Consider 1929. Consider 2008. Did either crash come with a dedicated lever for going the other way? They did not need one. Jaguar has simply cut out the middleman and bolted the downturn to the steering column.
