Jaguar is rumored to be working on a successor to the F-Type that will be mid-engined and even have an electrified drivetrain.
As far as flagship sports cars go, you could do a lot worse than the Jaguar F-Type. It’s been the cream of Jaguar’s crop for decades, with the current top-of-the-line F-Type SVR making 567 hp from its 5.0-L supercharged V8 engine.
However, it’s a front-engined car in an age where even a stodgy carmaker like GM has decided that mid-engined is the way to go. Jaguar is certainly a stodgy old British carmaker, but they’re hardly as behind the times as GM, so their engineers got hard to work on making a replacement to the F-Type that put the engine in the middle.
Now we have reports from AutoExpress that say not only will the replacement to the F-Type be mid-engined, it’ll also be a hybrid.
Jaguar is calling it the J-Type--probably. They recently trademarked the name in England, and we’re going to work on the assumption that this car is going to be called the J-Type. It’s a great name, honestly.
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Anyway, Jaguar is rumored to be basing the J-Type off the Honda NSX hybrid sports car. They plan to have a similarly sized mid-mounted twin-turbo V6 as the beating heart, with a pair of electric motors on both axles.
If the J-Type follows closely in the NSX’s footsteps, it’ll mean around 500 hp and 406 lb-ft of torque. However, that’s really not going to cut it in an age where every McLaren you see has close to 600 ponies at its disposal, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see the power figure boosted to be around that much by the time Jaguar starts throwing around teasers.
Interestingly, Jaguar is also rumored to have a purely electric version of the F-Type in the works with an eye toward the Porsche Taycan as their closest competition. Jaguar has plenty of experience on the EV front with their successful I-Pace commuter car, but we haven’t seen Jaguar lay down the electric gauntlet against another performance EV. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.
All of this is still hush-hush and very early in development so we can’t really confirm much. But Jaguar is angling to be a relevant player in the supercar game, and that can’t possibly be a bad thing.
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