Living with the now discontinued IPace

Saturday, July 19, 2025

Before looking to the present and the future, I want to start by looking at the past: Jaguar’s 2017 electric ambitions *2—an electric E-type, an AI steering wheel, and a vision for autonomous and connected travel.

That vision quite deliberately lacks any practical plans for charging, smart home integration, solar, carbon costs, or motorway fast charging. These are considerations that only now, 8 years later, JLR is finally pursuing *3 in its pilot plan with ev.energy. Let’s hope it does not take another 8 years for the plans around battery swapping and recycling to take shape.

Ongoing work on retooling the 61-year-old factory in Halewood, Merseyside *5, for the electric age could take years, and there is no firm timeline for the Gravity gigafactory being built by JLR’s parent company, Tata, in Bridgwater *6. This gigafactory is a £4 billion project that Tata is undertaking through its new global battery business, Agratas. Progress is currently slow, with only groundworks completed as of August 2024 when I last captured this drone photo.

Tata Agratas Gravity gigafactory in Somerset is planned to scale up to 40 GW and span over 300 acres, but there are no current timelines.

Maybe Jaguar is not entirely to blame; the beginning of the end started with LG Chem and an increasing number of shorts and fires in the battery modules it supplied starting in 2017, exhibiting a flaw that has come to be known as a “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 the chief reason for the discontinuation and strategy shift to more expensive, lower-volume, electric-only models. What also 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 issues date back to 2017 with other automakers like GM and Hyundai affected; the supposedly last recall was as recent as 2025.

Jaguar I-Pace Battery recall list: H441, H459, H484, H514

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. Resale value plummeted as it was discontinued, according to electrek it’s only second to the Audi Q8

This projected future of the I-Paces on the road and resale value based on 4.5% per year attrition model of industry scrap/survival rates

There aren’t many I-Paces on the market for Jaguar to continue servicing across its 2,000 dealerships worldwide. Assuming all 66,000 are still on the road, that’s one dealership for every 26 cars. However, looking forward, the UK network is being scaled down from 80 dealers to 20, and the USA from 200 to 120 *1.

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 new electric owners altogether, doubling down on their focus on petrol classics. This is understandable, considering the vast technological differences and the necessary shift from traditional mechanics to software diagnostic specialists.

Others have started investing in the training, services, and tooling needed. It will be interesting to see if this develops into a solid support network for what is soon to be a growing fleet of high-mileage I-Paces needing maintenance out of warranty.

TL;DR: Am I surprised that JLR is cutting 500 management jobs in the UK, delaying its new electric cars, and claiming there is no demand when the reality is that the JLR ecosystem and manufacturing won’t be ready for years? Not really. Am I worried about the future of the I-Paces currently on the road? Definitely.