Fans of Jaguar are familiar with the most high-performance range of vehicles being designated “R-S.” Whether talking about the XFR-S, or the XKR-S, it’s known in the automotive world that if you really want to impress people with a name, you should definitely use the letters “R” and/or “S” in some combination. Jaguar Land Rover is looking to change all that by sweeping aside these alphabet buddies in favor of the cutting-edge “SVR.”
This was seen at the 2014 Goodwood Festival of Speed this week in England. Goodwood is a historic occasion for the world’s fancy-pants to crack open a couple dozen bottles of champagne, talk about corporate earnings and drive beautiful cars really, really fast. As the hometown of Rolls-Royce, Goodwood is essentially the distinguished gentleman’s NASCAR.
Anyway, at Goodwood, Jaguar Land Rover introduced the Range Rover Sport SVR, and let the haters hate by defying convention and adding a “V” to the equation. Does it mean “versus,” thereby signifying some sort of competition between mom “R” and dad “S”? We don’t know. What we do know is that the RRS SVR—catchy, huh?—is some of the first fruit of Jaguar Land Rover’s new Special Operations division.
Though it sounds like a paramilitary group, Spec Ops will actually be similar to what BMW does with their “Individual” unit: a splinter faction that creates custom high-end orders on a bespoke level for special, special customers. This inches JLR closer to Goodwood hometeam Rolls-Royce: the majority of Rolls-Royce orders are completely tailored on the individual level. The 1 percent, it seems, don’t want to be just another face in the crowd of people who run the world.
With the XE coming on the way for Jaguar, and new editions of Range Rover for Land Rover, JLR is making all the right moves to position itself for success. Now if we could only steer clear of alphanumeric naming conventions.