When the news broke that Gerry McGovern had left Jaguar Land Rover, car social media lit up like a Christmas tree. There were jokes and stories of him being marched out of the Gaydon facility as if he had tried to drive a Defender through the reception desk. Mixed in with that was a very modern kind of outrage: “They sacked the guy who designed the new Jaguar, that is what you get for making that horrible slabby EV thing.”
Which is exactly the point where you realise most people have no idea how the car industry actually works. People tend to love the myth of the lone genius. It makes life simple. Gandini did the Countach, Giugiaro did the Golf, Bruno Sacco did the R129 SL and McGovern did the Range Rover. One man, one sketch, one car. It is a neat story and it is also almost always completely untrue. I’m guilty of this thinking myself.
Inside a car company, the design director is not Leonardo da Vinci hunched over a drawing board. He is closer to a conductor in front of an orchestra. The music exists because the players are very good and there are loads of them, but he is the one setting the tune or in a car manufacturer’s case, the brand.
Design directors do not sit there bashing out full side profiles and bucking clay every day. They sit in rooms, review work, guide teams and say yes or no at critical moments. They are tastemakers and gatekeepers. When a concept model is wheeled in, it is the director who sticks their thumb up or down. Whole careers can hinge on that gesture, but the hand doing it is not the hand that held the marker pen at 2 AM a year earlier.
This is why it is so stupid to say “McGovern ruined Jaguar”. He did not, he hired people, set direction and along with other corporate talking heads, protected certain ideas and killed others. That still gives him huge responsibility, but it is a different kind. Jaguar Land Rover is a perfect case study because the stakes have been so high. Range Rover sits in that tiny group of sacred objects in the car world alongside the Porsche 911 and the Volkswagen Golf. You are allowed to evolve it, but not reinvent it. You have to keep it current without breaking the bloodline. Get the proportions wrong or throw a gimmick onto the side and it will be ruined forever.
Under McGovern’s watch two complete generations of Range Rover have made it to market. Neither is perfect, both have details that wind people up, but they have aged incredibly well. Park an early L405 or the current car in a line of rivals and they still look calm and expensive rather than hysterical. That does not happen by accident and it does not happen by committee. Somebody at the top has to say “no” more often than they say “yes”. That is where a strong design director is vital. The uncomfortable truth is that most truly memorable car design is closer to a dictatorship than pure democracy. You need someone who will fight for a clean surface and a simple gesture when the business wants another chrome garnish. You also need someone who understands the weight of the badge on the grille.
The flip side is that strong personalities do not always make pleasant colleagues. The stories that follow McGovern around the industry are usually not even about cars, but the sharp comments, sometimes even downright rude behaviour with colleagues and journalists, who did not look excited enough at a new car launch. All of that paints a picture of a man who knew his power and liked to remind people of it. It also explains why his departure has produced more fascination than sympathy. People respect the work.
Then there is Jaguar itself. A brand that has spent the last decade hovering between reinvention and irrelevance. The recent big electric Jaguar concept was always going to be divisive. Some people saw clean modern luxury while others saw a bruiser with no sense of heritage. Either way it caused a reaction, which is what concepts are meant to do. What happened next was inevitable. As soon as the rumours started about McGovern being out, social media pinned the whole thing on that car. He designed a horrible Jag, the internet hated it, the board panicked, he got the boot. It is a satisfying story because it feels like instant justice. It is also almost certainly nonsense.
Real car programmes do not work on social media timescales. That electric Jaguar is the tip of a ten year iceberg of planning, investment and meetings. It has been through brand committees, product committees, finance committees and the Tata board. It has survived endless internal reviews and more PowerPoint slides than any human should ever have to sit through. No single designer, even a powerful one, just marches that through the system on their own charm.
Equally, no board that has already nailed its colours to an expensive new Jaguar future is going to sack the face of that future three days after the internet has a moan about a concept. That would be like putting up a giant sign saying “we no longer believe in our own plan”. Car companies are way too paranoid for that.What is much more believable is something far more mundane and far more familiar to anyone who has ever worked in a big organisation. Jaguar Land Rover has a new CEO. He comes from Tata, he knows the business, and now he finally has his hands on the steering wheel. He looks around, decides he does not like parts of the culture he sees, and starts to move the furniture.
If your design chief is a legendary figure who has been there for more than twenty years, has a reputation for being difficult, and is already beyond normal retirement age, the conversation almost writes itself. At that point it becomes less a story about hairstyles and concept cars and more a story about succession. A new CEO wanting a different balance between design, engineering and finance.
What matters is remembering that cars are not created by a single personality, however colourful. And the best thing that could come out of this for enthusiasts is simple – that Jaguar actually comes back into the light with cars that feel confident and distinct again rather than apologetic. And next time you see a headline shouting “So and so’s new masterpiece”, take a moment to think of the hundreds of people whose names you will never read.
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