LONDON, England (PNN) - December 4, 2025 - Another woke executive just bit the dust. This is what happens when a luxury car company stops making luxury cars and starts making TikTok craft projects for Brooklyn influencers. Jaguar’s big, bold, insanely expensive rebrand, the one that replaced cars with androgynous runway mimes wandering around like they escaped from a Dior perfume commercial, just blew up in spectacular fashion; and by “blew up,” we mean sales fell 97.5%.
Chief Creative Officer Gerry McGovern, the architect of Jaguar’s incomprehensible leap into the woke abyss, has been fired and escorted from the building.
Sales of Jaguar have imploded. Only 49 vehicles were sold throughout the whole of Europe in April.
This rebrand flop makes Cracker Barrel’s look like a major success.
Now the man who led the charge, McGovern, has been handed his layoff notice and escorted out of the building… as in, this is also what happens when you tell the people who mocked your cruddy ad that they are bigots. Another lesson learned the hard way.
It turns out the customer is always right, especially when they’re trying to buy a car, not watch a Vogue parade.
McGovern was a high-level exec and was the creative face of Jaguar and Land Rover’s entire modern design identity. But his high-concept clown show sent sales soaring off a cliff and sparked a civil war inside the company.
Now they are doing the corporate version of wiping fingerprints off the weapon and pretending they have never even met the guy.
The prolific car designer largely responsible for Land Rover’s present-day aesthetic, the look of the new Defender, and most recently, the eyebrow-raising Jaguar 00 - has been fired. His impact on both Jaguar and Land Rover has been immense, and his sudden departure would be a huge deal.
Autocar India broke the news, pointing out that McGovern’s exit “comes swiftly after PB Balaji assumed the CEO role [of JLR] on November 17, 2025.” Back in January, that publication also shared leaked internal comms indicating strife within the company over some of the design and rebranding and the way it was being handled. Those documents indicate parts of the Jaguar rebrand were outsourced to Accenture Interactive (third-party consultants).
McGovern’s title at JLR has been Chief Creative Officer. You can credit the sleek featurelessness of modern Land Rovers to his love of smooth lines. He is credited with leading the design of the third-gen Range Rover, the last Rover that looked interesting, before making the brand’s subsequent SUVs look like mid-range microwaves.
But of course, he’s mostly been on people’s radar lately for championing the controversial Jaguar rebrand. It is hard to say exactly how much of the high-concept, high-contrast video ads were directly from his brain - a big team has worked on the project, after all - but the cartoon Batmobile-looking luxury car and Dyson-style logo aesthetic are his babies.
In the end, Jaguar tried to sell cars without showing actual cars, thanks to a woke designer who thought customers wanted avant-garde performance art from a car company.
Next time, maybe skip the reinvention tour and remember why people buy Jaguars in the first place. They want a gorgeous car, not a front-row seat at a gender-studies dance recital.
