Living with the now discontinued IPace
The Jaguar I-Pace was introduced in 2018 and by the time it was discontinued in 2024 it sold around 66k units, for context Tesla sells as many cars in 2 weeks, BYD just in one week.
So there aren’t loads of I-Paces on the market and for Jaguar to keep having to service, with 2k dealerships worldwide, assuming all of these 66k are still on the roads, that’s one dealership for ever 26 cars, moving forward however the UK is on the way down to 20 dealers from 80, in the USA down to 120 from 200 *1
2020 I-Pace HSE with over 100K miles
This scale-down points to a future where independent Jaguar specialists will be increasingly seeing a demand for their custom from I-Pace owners. I spoke with a few in the UK.
Some have been shunning these newfangled electric owners coming their way altogether and doubled down on their focus on petrol classics, which is understandable considering the vast differences and the need for a shift from mechanics to software diagnostic specialists.
Others have starting investing in the training needed, the services and the tooling, it will be interesting if this develops into a slid support network for what is soon to be a growing fleet of 100k mile plus I-Paces needing maintenance out of warranty.
That future is highly uncertain, now let’s look at why this came to be and why Jaguar’s 2017 electric ambitions *2 of a electric E-type, AI steering wheel, autonomous and connected vision went up in smoke.
Jaguar’s electric vision of 2024
That vision quite deliberately lacks any plans for practicalities to do with charging, smart home integration, solar, carbon costs, motorway fast charging, etc, these are more practical considerations that only now 8 years later JLR is finally pursuing *3 in their pilot plan with ev.energy, never mind a battery swapping/recycling strategy, give it another 8 years for the plans around that to start forming.
That should provide sufficient time for both the ongoing work on retooling the 61-year-old factory in Halewood, Merseyside *5, for the electric age, and the Gravity gigafactory being built by JLR’s parent company, TATA, in the UK at Bridgwater *6. This gigafactory is a £4 billion project that TATA is undertaking through its new global battery business, Agratas.
Maybe Jaguar is not to blame, the beginning of the end started with LG Chem and an increasing amount of shorts and fires in battery modules with a folder anode tab it supplied starting 2017.
lg chem folded anode tab
In July 2024, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) confirmed that the I‑Pace—as well as several other Jaguar models—were “delivering close to zero profitability” arguably this was a chief reason for the discontinuation and strategy shift to more expensive lower volume electric only models, what did not help were the myriad of problems stemming from LG Chem’s Ochang, South Korea plant (and others) producing defective pouch cells with folded or torn anode tabs and separators, production was halted in 2021 but it goes back to 2017 with other automakers like GM and Hyundai affected and the supposedly last recall is as recent as 2025.
The top 5 issues with the Jaguar I-Pace
Jaguar I-Pace Battery recall list: H441, H459, H484, H514
TL/DR : Surprised that JLR is cutting 500 management jobs in the UK, delaying their new electric cars, lying about there being no demand when the reality is the JLR ecosystem and the manufacturing won’t be ready for years … not really, worried about the future of the I-Paces on the road, definitely.