Jaguar's 1000bhp electric GT driven: how the new car honours a forgotten '70s icon

It’s been an interesting month for British blue bloods and the cars their creators hope will help ensure their survival. For not only did I drive the new Aston Martin Valhalla,but I was also lucky enough to be the first journalist to drive Jaguar’s new electric GT on something that might pass for a public road.

It was actually the test track within JLR’s enormous Gaydon complex. As well as the rapid circuit that grew from the runway of the RAF Gaydon bomber base, we used the twiddly and deliberately appallingly surfaced small roads found within. The car was heavily camouflaged inside and out and while its mechanical engineering was complete, the software side of things was described as “70% there” with much detail work to be done.

You will likely know already the car is a sleek four-door, similar in appearance to the Type 00 concept that caused such a stir a while back, that it will have a minimum of 1000bhp and will likely cost around £150,000 when customers start receiving theirs perhaps less than a year from now.

But as with the Aston, I was far more interested in the feel of the thing and the manner in which it performed, than whatever mad amount of speed might result. And I can report that despite likely having twice the power of an XJ220, the as-yet unnamed car still does what it does in a very Jaguar way. The electronics engineers have deliberately held it back in those initial milliseconds between application of foot to pedal and arrival of maximum power and made sure its potential is meted out progressively, not all at once, so what you feel is invigorated, not a desire to vomit. Less good for scaring your family, but keeps the dry-cleaning bills down. Besides, once it’s going, no one but an idiot is ever going to wish it were faster.

“I remember the ease with which Steed and his Jag took on a racing car”

But there is more, far more, to making a car a true Jaguar. This is no sports car and its immense heft (think around 2.7 tonnes) means that even with all-wheel steering and active torque vectoring it’s never going to feel nimble. Even so it steers properly, resists understeer as all true Jaguars should, and appears to ride as well as anything this side of a Rolls-Royce, at least once up to speed.

Low speed bump absorption still needs work and we’ll not know for sure just how capable it is until I’ve driven it extensively on roads other than those upon which it was developed. So all I’ll say for now is so far, so good, but there’s still more to find out about this crucial, for Jaguar, car.

Talk to Jaguar top brass about which of its previous efforts they would like the new car to spiritually succeed, and they’ll all say the XJ12C built in small numbers in the mid-70s. And having driven the two back to back, I can see why: the new car may be over a tonne heavier and perhaps four times as powerful, but in the understated way it goes about its business it is clearly a chip off the old block.

The XJ12C is perhaps best remembered for being the wheels au choix of John Steed in The New Avengers even if Patrick Macnee reputedly hated driving it. The car itself was a development prototype delivered in standard specification but with Ralph Broad body bits and fat wheels and tyres to make it look more racy. And well do I remember the insouciant ease with which the bowler-hatted Steed and his Jag took on, overtook and flagged down a slicks and wings racing car at Silverstone. At the time the sheer implausibility of it all was lost on the 10-year-old me, but half a century later I did some digging and discovered the race car in question was a Formula 2 March 752, likely powered by a very perky 2-litre BMW race motor. And I thought James Bond and his DB5 keeping up with a Ferrari F355 in GoldenEye was pretty ridiculous… Even so, I’d be curious to find out what happened to the old Jag: last I could find was that it was sold in ‘barn find’ condition at auction in 2015 for £69,750.

The family Golf suffered blow-outs on consecutive days this month, both caused by potholes, both of which would have immobilised its modern equivalent because, like most new cars, a spare wheel is not part of its standard equipment. Instead VW will charge you £315 for the space saver that used to be free. The excuse? That it keeps weight down, and of course no mention of the millions VW pockets by not including it. I’m sure many other manufacturers are similarly mean-minded. Even so, I’d still grit my teeth and pay it. On both occasions a bottle of tyre sealant would have been entirely useless and would have left first my wife and then me stranded, in my case in the dark and rain on the far side of a blind bend.

The pothole problem is appalling: in February 2025 the RAC responded to 66 pothole-related call-outs; this February that number was 225. So if you don’t know whether your new-ish car has a spare wheel, I think it likely it won’t and that you may or may not feel like doing something about it.