Jaguar F-Pace to be brand’s best-selling model
The newly released Jaguar F-Pace SUV is expected to become the best-selling model in the British brand's portfolio, as it seeks to capture a slice of the ever-growing SUV segment.
Speaking to CarAdvice at the launch of the F-Pace in Byron Bay last week, Jaguar Land Rover Australia CEO, Matt Wiesner, said the SUV will bring an entirely new audience to the brand. The company is expecting to see significant interest from buyers that would’ve otherwise never considered a Jaguar.
“F-Pace brings the relevance to Jaguar from a broader market perspective that it hasn’t had, quite frankly.” Wiesner told CarAdvice.
“XE has been very good, XE has certainly been an important part of starting that process. We’ve really be starting to invest in telling the story of Jaguar about a year-and-a-half ago, following on from F-Type, et cetera, but F-Pace really broadens the reach that none of the others had.
"And when you look at the appeal that F-Pace has in that context - female buyers, families - the segment that we will position it in is growing at a significant rate.”
According to Weisner, the importance of F-Pace is two-fold. One, that it attracts SUV buyers where an option didn’t previously exist and, two, it potentially stops existing Land Rover or Range Rover buyers from leaving the British brand’s portfolio in search of something more dynamic.
“We would be expecting conquest to be 80-90 per cent. For Jaguar, that’s not hard, as we’ve never been in the SUV space and we’ve never had a vehicle that would have such a broad appeal to a market like females, families, et cetera," he said.
"And also what it does for us from a group point-of-view, we would see movement from within, we will see people upsizing, downsizing and moving around. Be it within the Land Rover or Range Rover product, they will potentially be looking at this as their next option - and in many of those cases there was a risk that maybe we would’ve lost them as they wanted something different. So it stops a good number of that 'leakage' that might’ve happened.”
Jaguar’s ‘too expensive’ perception issue may also be further solved by the F-Pace, a process that started with the launch of the XE.
“F-Type has been fantastic in regards to what it has done in and around our driving and Jaguar performance," Wiesner said.
"XE as a car is a fantastic sport saloon that drives a lot of what the F-Type has been doing, but from a positioning point-of-view it has been getting rid of that perception that all Jaguars are expensive and this [F-Pace] has taken it to another level. It will probably do more of that heavy lifting, because it is in such a big market segment.”
As for sales expectations, Weisner expects similar numbers to the Range Rover Evoque.
“We hope to get about 1500 for the remainder of this [fiscal] year, and hopefully we can get all of our production and then in a full year I think with this product it has absolute the ability to do similar numbers as Evoque volumes (2300-2500 per year) as this car has a broader appeal with its design focus.”
First deliveries of the Jaguar F-Pace start in August.
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