Jaguar has had 7,000 orders for the new XF which it started to ship to its global dealer network last week.
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“A lot of customers have placed orders without even seeing the car on the road and I think we will see a rapid ramp up in orders now,” Jaguar Cars managing director Mike O’Driscoll said.
The XF would be on sale in most world markets by early March, he said.
“I’m really pleased with the launch programme for the car and the media reaction up to this point,” he said.
O’Driscoll said that after a traumatic last decade for Jaguar, 2008 would be “a good time to be working at Jaguar.
“I am not making any volume projections, Jaguar isn’t about chasing volume, it’s about quality of sales, not quantity.”
Sales last year were down to 60,000 and Jaguar doesn’t need to sell many more cars than that each year to be profitable, he said.
“Porsche, at 100,000 cars a year, is much more the company we should be. We are not a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz.
“I want to build a company we can all be proud of and a company that can stand on its own two feet; we’re changing the company dramatically and very quickly and that’s exciting.”
It was important to rebuild the Jaguar business in North America, he said.
“Jaguar does well when it does well in the UK and North America,” said O’Driscoll adding that 2007 had been a really difficult year this side of the Atlantic with X-type withdrawn, run-out of the S-type and tough trading conditions because of the dollar exchange rate.
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