Bertone Jaguar B99: Bertone aren't giving up

Bertone Jaguar B99 Design Gallery below

Bertone release a gallery of images of the Bertone Jaguar B99 in what seems a desperate effort to convince the design is the perfect New Small Jaguar.

The car world seemed to speak as one when they saw the the Bertone Jaguar B99 Concept we reported on just before the Geneva Motor Show. Glorious, they said. Just what a Jaguar should look like, they declared. But we didn’t agree.

We didn’t change our minds when we saw the Bertone Jaguar B99 on the floor at Geneva last week either. It just seemed so ‘Old’ Jaguar to us; a look back instead of the look forward we now expect from Jaguar.

And Jaguar agreed with us rather than the consensus as Adrian Hallmark publicly declared the Bertone B99 as not for Jaguar.

That statement by Jaguar seems to have sparked a whiff of desperation at Bertone, as they’ve release a gallery of sketches and images of the B99 (photo gallery at the bottom). It seems they can’t accept that they’ve got it wrong, and hope imagery of the design process will convince. It won’t.

We’ve had a lot of stick for rejecting Bertone’s take on a New Small Jaguar. Lots of emails asking how we can so dislike what Bertone has done. But they miss the point. The point isn’t that we don’t love the Jaguar Bertone B99. We do.

But we also love the Jaguar SS and the E-Type and the MK I XJ6 and the XK120 and… we just love Jaguars. But the only way to have Jaguars to continue to love is to look forward, not keep trying to recreate the past.

Make a glorious future instead of living off past glories. Past glories are everything the Bertone B99 shouts. That’s why the B99 won’t work.

Of course, if Bertone are so convinced they could tout around for some funding to build the Jaguar Bertone B99 themselves. And they may well succeed, even if it would end up costing a fortune. And everyone will declare it a wonderful creation and heap praise on it. But in the end, no one will buy it.

And that’s the whole point.