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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

They can't do that. Luxury products are largely defined by:

1. How "exclusive" they are.

2. The age and heritage of the brand

3. How difficult they are to manufacture. (The difficulty could be artificial.)

Jaguar fails on basically all counts. (1) Price isn't necessarily a stand-in for #1 -- on the very high-end, you have to make it actually difficult to acquire the product in question, and they're not going to do that. (2) Jaguar has a reputation that's somewhere from "weird" to "terrible," not the storied reputation of an old French brand like Bugatti. (3) The Chinese can manufacture that car in a heartbeat. Give CATL and BYD free reign, and they'll probably do a much better job of it.

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Jaguar absolutely has a very long history of making exclusive low production volume sports cars and supercars that fit all 3 of those criteria. In the 90s they were selling the XJ220 for what would nowadays be about 1.3 million- it was both one of the fastest, and one of the most expensive cars in the world at the time.

In general, they also have a long - "storied" racing history, and have consistently moved that racing technology into production high performance automobiles. At many points in history, starting with the XK120 in the 1940s they were selling the fastest supercars in the world.

Jaguar's reputation for reliability is no worse than the French and Italian exotic cars... you didn't buy a European car with a V12 in the 1970s if you couldn't afford a lot to keep it up.

The 1940s were long ago, and recent times have been terrible for Jaguar. First sold to Ford and mismanaged, then hastily offloaded at a loss to Tata in 2008, and floundering even worse ever since. Seems to me that they're now considered a mid-tier brand, probably somewhere below BMW.

Fair enough, but I think car people remember or know of the history, and they could in principle reclaim it with high end products like they once made. Almost all car manufacturers that are still around have gone through rough periods and had to revive their brand image.

Bugatti is obviously Italian, not French...

Bugatti was headquartered in Alsace and is historically considered a French rather than Italian brand. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugatti

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