Is Jaguar British or German?

Jaguar is British. It was founded in Blackpool, England, and is based in Coventry, where parent company JLR has its head office at Whitley. It has never been German. The foreign link is ownership, since JLR belongs to India's Tata Motors. Lyons dropped the old SS initials in 1945 so the name could not be confused with a foreign one.

Does Jaguar still use the leaping Jaguar?

Yes. The leaping cat is still an official Jaguar mark, now called the Maker's Mark, but it is no longer the main Jaguar logo. That role went to the JaGUar wordmark in 2024. The cat that did disappear is the roaring face on the round grille badge, which gave way to a J and r monogram.

Was the Jaguar rebrand a disaster?

It is too early to say. The rebrand drew loud criticism from public figures and commentators, and Jaguar sales fell about 97.5 percent in 2025. That drop came mainly because Jaguar had stopped building its old cars in 2024, so there was little to sell. The real test is the production Type 01.

What is the controversial Jaguar ad?

It is the advertisement Jaguar released on November 19, 2024, to show the new Jaguar logo and branding ahead of its electric-only relaunch. The controversy came from the reaction to it, as the ad and the new identity drew heavy criticism online, including from Elon Musk and British politician Nigel Farage.

What is Jaguar's slogan?

Jaguar's current slogan is "Copy Nothing," introduced with the 2024 rebrand and credited to founder William Lyons's thinking. Its best-known historic slogan is "Grace, Space, Pace," once used to sell Jaguar's cars. Both still turn up in articles about the brand, but only Copy Nothing is the official line today.

Why did Jaguar stop making cars?

Jaguar stopped making its gasoline and diesel cars in 2024 to clear the way for an electric-only lineup. After June 2024 only the F-Pace SUV was still being built. The gap lasts until the first new model, the Type 01 four-door GT, whose production version Jaguar plans to reveal in late 2026, with sales from 2027.

Is Jaguar an expensive car?

Yes. Jaguar is a luxury brand, and its new electric cars will cost more than the models they replace. Jaguar has said it expects prices to roughly double as it moves further upmarket, aiming the relaunched brand at a much smaller and wealthier group of buyers than before.

Jaguar Logo: History, Meaning & 2024 Rebrand

The current Jaguar logo is the mixed-case “JaGUar” wordmark, unveiled on November 19, 2024, as the new face of the brand ahead of its relaunch as an electric-only carmaker.

The new Jaguar logo is not a single mark. It is a system of four named parts: the Signature (also called the Device Mark), the Maker’s Mark, the Artist’s Mark and a graphic code called the Strikethrough. The leaping cat is still in it. The roaring cat’s face that sat on Jaguar grilles for decades is not.

The Device Mark: the “JaGUar” wordmark

The Device Mark spells the name as J-a-G-U-a-r. The capital G and U are drawn at the same height as the lowercase letters, so the word reads as one even line. Jaguar sums it up as “Symmetry. Simplicity. Statement.” and ties it to modernism. The letters come from a bespoke geometric typeface made for the brand.

The Maker’s Mark: the Leaper stays

Jaguar did not delete its cat. The Leaper was redrawn with sharper angles, set against horizontal strikethrough lines, and went from being the main Jaguar logo to the Maker’s Mark. Jaguar’s own caption for it is “Always leaping forward.”

The Artist’s Mark: the J and r monogram

The Artist’s Mark is a circle holding the J and the lowercase r, the first and last letters of the wordmark. It is symmetrical, so it looks the same upside down, and it was shown in brass. It takes over the round-badge role from the Growler, which has no place in the 2024 system.

Colors and the Strikethrough

The wordmark launched in gold and brass on white. Brass was picked because it develops a patina over time. If you are looking for the gold Jaguar car logo, this brass-on-white version is the one from the relaunch; the first Growler badges also had a gold head. Around the logo, the brand palette builds on the primary colors red, blue and yellow.

The Strikethrough is a set of bold horizontal lines that Jaguar calls “a deletion of ordinary,” meant to run through everything the brand makes. Jaguar has published no official color codes. Flat files of the wordmark, including the Jaguar logo PNG at the top of this page, show it in dark gray or black.

Why did Jaguar change its logo in 2024?

The short answer: Jaguar is relaunching as an electric-only marque and wanted a new Jaguar logo and identity to go with it. The company calls the new direction “exuberant modernism,” led by chief creative officer Gerry McGovern.

The tagline behind the launch is “Copy Nothing,” taken from William Lyons’s idea that a Jaguar should be “a copy of nothing.”

The change also came with a smaller, more exclusive target market. Jaguar ended production of its combustion cars in 2024 and has said it expects to keep only 10 to 15 percent of its existing customers. What comes next:

Early December 2024: the Type 00 concept, a non-production show car, was shown at Miami Art Week.
Type 01: a four-door electric GT, named as the first car of the new Jaguar.
Late 2026 and 2027: Jaguar plans to reveal the production Type 01 in late 2026, with sales expected from 2027.

Jaguar logo history: from the SS badge to the 2024 rebrand

The old Jaguar logo went through nine main versions before the 2024 rebrand, counting the Leaper mascot and the Growler badge. The business started in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company, making motorcycle sidecars, but the word Jaguar only appeared in September 1935, as a model name. So the earliest Jaguar marks are really SS badges. What SS stood for was never officially fixed: Swallow Sidecar and Standard Swallow are both cited.

1935–1945: The SS Jaguar winged badge

SS Cars Ltd was incorporated on October 26, 1933, and took over the Swallow business in 1934. The Jaguar name arrived on the SS Jaguar 2½-liter sedan and the SS Jaguar 100 two-seater. The badge put an SS monogram inside a hexagon, flanked by spread wings over a fanned tail, with “Jaguar” on a scroll underneath. Most renderings show it in bronze tones.

1938: The Leaper hood ornament

The leaping cat was designed by F. Gordon Crosby, an illustrator for The Autocar magazine, and first appeared on cars late in 1938. The factory mascot followed an aftermarket Desmo cat that was famously dismissed as looking like “a cat shot off a fence,” a remark credited to Lyons or to his publicity chief Bill Rankin. The first version stayed in production until the Mark V sedan ended in 1951.

Many Jaguar logo histories date the Leaper to 1945 or 1982. Both dates are wrong: it goes back to 1938.

1945–c.1951: The winged JAGUAR badge

On March 23, 1945, SS Cars shareholders agreed to rename the business Jaguar Cars Limited. Lyons said the name Jaguar “is distinctive” and could not be “confused with any similar foreign name.” The widely accepted background is that the war had tied the letters SS to the Nazi SS. The badge kept its wings and tail, but the hexagon now read JAGUAR, with no SS left on it. This was the first Jaguar Cars logo.

c.1951–1957: The serif JAGUAR wordmark

Logo archives show a plain black uppercase JAGUAR in a flared serif for these years, with no wings and no cat. The dates come from logo collections rather than from Jaguar.

1950s–2024: The Growler roundel

The Growler is a round badge with a snarling jaguar head seen from the front. Early versions had a gold head on red with a black border, and modern ones a silver head and border on red. It has been used since the 1950s, and it was not short-lived: it stayed on grilles until the 2024 rebrand dropped it.

c.1982–2001: Leaper over a green wordmark

From around 1982, the corporate Jaguar logo paired a line drawing of the Leaper with a dark green JAGUAR wordmark. At most, this marks when the cat joined the printed logo, not when it was invented.

2001–2012: A refined black Leaper

The 2001 update drew a cleaner, more detailed Leaper in black on white. The wordmark switched from green to black in a smooth sans-serif.

2012–2021: The 3D silver Leaper

In 2012 the Leaper became three-dimensional, with a silver gradient, shading and highlights, over a silver wordmark. It was the last new Jaguar Cars logo before the company became Jaguar Land Rover Ltd at the start of 2013, and it was a logo redesign only. The stand-up hood ornament had already gone years earlier.

2021–2024: The flat Leaper

The last Jaguar logo before the rebrand dropped the gradient for a flat, single-color Leaper and a wide, extended sans-serif wordmark.

2024–present: The rebrand

Unlike earlier Jaguar logos, the 2024 identity replaced the Leaper-over-wordmark lockup with the JaGUar Device Mark and kept the cat as the Maker’s Mark, as described at the top of this page.

What the Jaguar car logo means and where you’ll see it

The Jaguar symbol has always been the animal itself. The leaping cat is meant to suggest grace, elegance, performance and power, and the ambition to keep moving forward. Both the Leaper and the Growler show it, which puts Jaguar among other car logos with animals.

The Leaper: the leaping Jaguar symbol

The Leaper, the best-known Jaguar car symbol, shows a jaguar stretched out mid-jump. It started as Crosby’s 1938 hood mascot and became the flat badge found on the rear and sides of modern Jaguar cars. Since 2024 it has been the Maker’s Mark, so the Jaguar logo car owners know best is still part of the brand.

The Growler: the roaring face badge

The Growler, which some dealers call the Roaring Jaguar, is the round emblem with the cat’s face. On recent models it sat on the grille while the Leaper emblem went on the back, so a Jaguar car with logo badges front and rear often carried both. The 2024 identity replaced it with the J and r monogram.

What happened to the Jaguar hood ornament?

The stand-up Leaper vanished from new Jaguars in the mid-2000s, pushed out by safety rules:

Late 1938: the first Leaper mascot is fitted to cars.
1968 model year: US rules end fixed stand-up hood ornaments.
Around 2005: Jaguar stops fitting the Leaper as European pedestrian-safety rules tighten.

Logo sites often say the ornament went in 2012, but that year belongs to the silver logo redesign.

Jaguar company history in brief

Jaguar is one of the British car brands whose ownership changed several times:

1922: William Lyons and William Walmsley found the Swallow Sidecar Company in Blackpool.
1933–1934: SS Cars Ltd is incorporated and, after Walmsley sells out, takes over the Swallow business.
1945: the company is renamed Jaguar Cars Limited.
1966: a merger with BMC creates British Motor Holdings, which becomes British Leyland in 1968.
1984: Jaguar is floated on the stock market.
1990: Ford completes its takeover, and Jaguar leaves the stock market on February 28, 1990.
2008: Ford sells Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors for £1.7 billion, closing on June 2.
2013: on January 1, Jaguar Cars Ltd is renamed Jaguar Land Rover Ltd.

Jaguar Logo: History, Meaning and the 2024 Rebrand

Key facts