A $450,000 SL, and Jaguar finally shows its hand

Good morning. Monday's Auction Desk car, the 18k-mile RENNtech SL74, sold for $450,000. We wrote it up at $100,000. It now stands as the most expensive R129 ever sold in public, and my own SL500 has taken the news about as well as you'd expect from a car that cost me a fraction of that.

One piece of auction arithmetic is worth keeping next to that number. The buyer's fee is 5%, capped at $7,500, a ceiling it reaches at $150,000. Past that point, the cost of a bigger headline stops growing. At $450,000 the fee works out to about 1.7% of the price, which makes a record unusually affordable for anyone, whether buyer, seller or builder, who stands to benefit from a record existing. Nothing on the public record suggests that's what happened here, and two determined bidders chasing the cleanest SL74 left is a perfectly good explanation. The next SL74 to come to market will be priced against this one all the same, so it helps to know how little a number like this costs to set.

Today's auction car sits at the other end of the price range, and the rest of the issue belongs to Jaguar, which finally showed the car it has spent two years asking us to imagine.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Let’s roll.

This 1992 Porsche 911 Carrera 2 coupe was built for the rest of the world, not for us. Rest-of-world (RoW) cars were the export-spec versions Porsche sold outside the U.S., and this one spent part of its life in Japan before coming over. It now wears a Washington title, sits with a dealer in Malibu, and carries a disclosure that settles where it can live: the seller states it cannot pass a California emissions test, so it can't be sold to a private buyer in the state where it's parked. It has more passport stamps than most of us and still can't get a smog certificate.

The spec is a classic 964 C2 with one asterisk. The air-cooled 3.6-liter M64 flat-six was factory-rated at 247 hp and 228 lb-ft, and it drives the rear wheels through a four-speed Tiptronic automatic. The no-sunroof body has been repainted in a color the dealer calls Linen Grey, over black leather. Equipment includes 17-inch Cup wheels refinished in silver on new Continental tires, lowering springs, headlight washers, a rear wiper, the speed-activated rear spoiler, heated power front seats, air conditioning, cruise control and a Porsche Classic PCCM infotainment unit. The odometer shows 124,000 km, about 77,000 miles, roughly 2,000 km of which were added by the current owner.

That owner bought the car in 2026 and has since spent more than $7,000 on it. The rear axle was rebuilt and the left-rear boot replaced in September. The brakes got new discs, pads and fluid within the last two months, along with a caliper repair and an ABS wiring fix. An August service covered oil, an A/C recharge, belts, the air filter and both distributor caps (the 964's twin-plug ignition runs two). Sale prep added paint correction, new body seals and refreshed exterior lighting and trim, with paint-meter readings in the gallery. The Carfax is clean.

The line I read twice is the leak-down test. Every cylinder came in under 5% except #2, which measured 9%, attributed to "exhaust leakage." In a leak-down, you pressurize each cylinder at top dead center and listen for where the air escapes. Air at the tailpipe points to the exhaust valve, air at the intake points to the intake valve, and air at the oil filler points to the rings. A leaky exhaust pipe doesn't change the percentage on the gauge. So on a single cylinder, "exhaust leakage" reads to me as an exhaust valve that isn't seating as well as its neighbors. Nine percent isn't alarming on an air-cooled 911, and plenty run at that number for years, but I'd ask the seller to confirm what they meant before bidding.

Bidding stood at $38,500 as of Tuesday. The auction closes this evening at 6:01 PM.

My call: I think this finishes between $57,000 and $65,000. On paper that's too much for a Tiptronic with a repaint and a California asterisk, and the comps above would agree with me. But I've watched enough air-cooled 911s cross the line to know that Porsche buyers in the final two minutes of an auction have never once consulted the comps.

Back in #28 we circled October 6. Last night in New York, Jaguar delivered: the Type 01, the production four-door GT that follows the pink Type 00 concept that set off the internet in Miami in December 2024. The reveal arrived about a year later than first promised, slowed by a cooling EV market and the cyberattack that stopped JLR's factories for five weeks last fall.

The awkward truth about the concept is that it wasn't the starting point. Jaguar designed the production car first and built the concept from it, which means the proportions everyone argued about in 2024 were never a styling exercise that might get softened. They were the car. Two years of renderings later, the shape reads as striking rather than shocking, and Jaguar may be quietly grateful for the head start.

It is about 17 feet long and under five feet tall, rides on 23-inch wheels (21s are optional and good for more range), and has no rear window. A camera feeds a display mounted at the top of the dash. The long stretch of bodywork between the front axle and the base of the windshield, which Jaguar calls the luxury gap, takes up 17% of the car's length, the same share it does on an E-Type. On an EV there's no engine to fill that space, so the battery pack extends forward of the cabin instead. A brass-effect strip runs the length of it, laser-engraved with the leaping cat. The rear three-quarter aluminum pressing is reportedly known inside the company as the impossible panel, formed across five planes with three feature lines meeting at a single point.

The hardware is serious. Three motors, one front and two rear, make about 1,000 hp and roughly 1,000 lb-ft, enough for 0 to 62 mph in 3.2 seconds. The 118 kWh NMC battery runs on an 850-volt architecture. Jaguar estimates up to 400 miles of EPA range on the smaller wheels, and about 320 miles at a steady 75 mph, which is the number that matters on a long highway run. Peak charging is 350 kW, good for about 200 miles in roughly 13 minutes. Weight distribution is 50:50, and Dynamic mode sends up to 87% of the power to the rear axle. Inside, a full-length center spine splits the cabin into four individual seats, with a 24-inch OLED driver display, a 7-inch portrait center screen and a panoramic glass roof.

A confession for context: at 18, I drove an S-Type 4.0 and was completely sure it was fast and cool. Its V8 made about 280 hp. The Type 01's front motor makes more than that by itself, and there are two more behind it. Ignorance was bliss, and I enjoyed every one of those 280 horsepower.

Pricing lands around £120,000 in the UK, roughly $160,000 here before tariffs and taxes. Order books open early in 2027, and first deliveries are planned for the second half of the year, assuming the schedule holds this time. The car is built in the UK. For scale, Jaguar's average U.S. transaction price used to sit around $60,000 to $70,000.

Jaguar's spec sheet buried its most interesting engineering decision in one line: an 850-volt architecture that splits into two 400-volt halves when it meets an older charger. To see why that matters, start with the equation every EV engineer works inside. Power equals voltage times current.

A 350 kW charging session at 400 volts needs about 875 amps. At 800 volts it needs about 440. Halving the current matters because resistive heat scales with the square of current, so the same cable carrying half the amps makes a quarter of the heat. That's the case for 800 volts: thinner, lighter copper in the car, less heat to reject while fast charging, and a charging curve that stays high for longer. Porsche put it into production first with the Taycan in 2019. Hyundai and Kia's E-GMP cars, the Porsche and Audi PPE platform, Lucid, the Cybertruck and BMW's new Neue Klasse iX3 have followed. Most of the volume market, including the Model 3, the Model Y and VW's MEB cars, still runs around 400 volts.

The cost sits in parts you never see. At 800 volts, the inverter all but requires silicon-carbide switches, which cost more than conventional silicon (Tesla adopted them early even at 400 volts). Every connector, contactor and insulation spec has to be rated up. Then there's the infrastructure problem, because much of the public charging network was built around 400-volt cars. Manufacturers have three answers. Hyundai routes the incoming charge through the drive motor and inverter to step the voltage up. Lucid fits a dedicated DC-DC converter. Porsche's PPE platform, and now Jaguar, split the pack into two banks that charge side by side at 400 volts and reconnect in series to drive. Each one trades weight, cost and complexity differently. At the far end, BYD has already shown a 1,000-volt platform built for megawatt charging.

As for who makes the cells: through August 2026, CATL supplied roughly 39% of the world's EV battery capacity and BYD about 15%, so two Chinese companies cover more than half the market on their own. LG Energy Solution, the battery business LG Chem spun off in 2020, was third at around 8%, ahead of SK On, Panasonic and Samsung SDI. The seven Chinese suppliers in the top ten held about 73% combined.

Chemistry is moving the same direction. LFP (lithium iron phosphate) cells are cheaper, contain no nickel or cobalt, tolerate more charge cycles and carry less energy per kilogram, and they reached 57% of the market this year. Nickel-rich NMC still owns the high-performance end, which is why Jaguar chose it for the Type 01.

Cell format is the other dividing line. Cylindrical cells (Tesla, Panasonic, BMW's new 46-millimeter-diameter cells) are cheap to make by the billion and easy to cool, but a pack needs thousands of them. Prismatic cells in hard cans (CATL, Samsung SDI, and BYD's long, thin Blade) package efficiently and cut part count. Pouch cells (LG, SK On) are light and flexible in shape but need outside structure to control swelling. The newest packs skip the module layer entirely and bond cells straight into the pack or the floor, so the battery becomes part of the car's structure.

Tata bought Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford in 2008 for $2.3 billion, and for most of the years since, Land Rover has done the earning. Jaguar peaked at roughly 180,000 sales in 2018, then ran out of road: sedans fell out of fashion, the electric I-Pace never found volume, and by most accounts the brand struggled to make money at its old price points.

The current state is stark. In the three months to September 30, JLR wholesaled 82,400 vehicles, up 24.5% from a year earlier as dealers restocked after the cyberattack. Jaguar accounted for 800 of them, under 1%. In the same quarter last year, Jaguar retailed 6,910. Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and Defender made up 77.6% of wholesales, and the U.S. took about a third of the total.

The last full fiscal year, which ended in March 2026, shows how thin the cushion got. Revenue fell 20.9% to £22.9 billion (about $30.7 billion). Profit before tax and exceptional items fell to £14 million (about $19 million) from £2.5 billion (about $3.4 billion) the year before, and the company posted a £244 million loss after tax (about $327 million). The five-week production stop cost £196 million (about $263 million) in direct exceptional costs alone, and a UK monitoring body put the wider economic damage at £1.6 billion to £2.1 billion (about $2.1 billion to $2.8 billion). U.S. tariffs, a weaker China and the planned Jaguar wind-down did the rest. The final quarter recovered to £458 million (about $614 million) in pre-tax profit and a 9.2% EBIT margin, which is the closest thing to good news in the filing.

Are the old Jaguars coming back? No. The XE, XF, F-Type, E-Pace and I-Pace ended production in 2024, and the last F-Pace, the final combustion Jaguar, left Solihull on December 19, 2025. Replacements for the XF, F-Pace, XJ and F-Type were in development and then cancelled, according to the brand's former design director. Until Type 01 deliveries start, the Jaguar showroom is a waiting list.

The new plan swaps volume for price. As a hypothetical, if the Type 01 found 8,000 buyers a year at an average of $160,000, that would be about $1.3 billion in revenue, or a little over two weeks of JLR's sales last fiscal year. The goal is margin and brand value, not scale. An SUV is expected to follow the Type 01, and reports point to a large limousine after that, both likely on the same Jaguar Electric Architecture. JLR has committed £18 billion (about $24 billion) over the five years from FY24 across all of its brands, and the Range Rover and Defender profits are what make that number possible.

The volume, meanwhile, is going somewhere else. JLR confirmed this week that Freelander, its new brand built with China's Chery, will launch in the UK. If you want to know where JLR expects to sell cars by the hundred thousand later this decade, it isn't under the leaping cat.

That's a wrap. See you Friday — same inbox, lower gear.

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