I once bought a Mercedes S-Class and it was a huge mistake

I once made the mistake of buying and running a Mercedes S-Class. It felt weirdly underwhelming; more like a barge than a car. Not that I’m the only paying customer falling out of love with luxury saloons. Lately, they’ve been selling so atrociously that their registration figures are in danger of becoming statistically irrelevant.

In the UK over the past decade, sales of such cars have more than halved. In 2025, fewer than three buyers per day bought a BMW i7 – despite it being by far the number-one seller in the sector. Its S-Class arch-rival couldn’t even find two paying customers daily. At best, each luxury saloon only sells in the hundreds per year – even when they’re the ‘most popular’ models in their elite (allegedly) sector.

All this means that of the two million-plus new cars sold in the UK last year, 99.8 per cent of them were NOT luxury saloons. In that sense, the business case for designing, building and trying to sell such high-priced vehicles that sit very much on the fringe has to be seriously questioned in the mid-2020s. The evidence clearly shows that worryingly few buyers want them. My guess is that as times, trends and tastes change, people don’t really want to be seen in them.

Why should we care? Because UK PLC, British companies such as Bentley and Rolls-Royce and plenty of Brit workers have long had roles to play in this niche sector that was always quite small, but has shrunk further still over the past decade.

Now countless Jag workers are joining in as they start playing the tricky luxury saloon game for the first time. Will the “reimagined” (its word) Coventry firm be able to grow this tiny market next year and beyond, or will it be content merely stealing a few sales (not that there are many to steal) from the German and British firms who’ve occupied this highly specialised field for countless decades? None of us on the outside (or, I suspect, on the inside at Jaguar HQ or at its franchised dealer network) know for sure, because this is such new, unknown territory for the firm and its retailers seeking younger, wealthier, saloon car-loving buyers who are happy to wear Jag badges.

As I exclusively revealed in Auto Express about 14 years ago, Rolls-Royce – even back then – was quietly thinking of doing the unthinkable by gently moving away from increasingly out-of-fashion saloons and into more popular, on-trend SUVs. And that 
is exactly what it did. The same goes for Bentley.

The new Jaguar Type 01 four-door GT (née saloon) will be revealed this week, and deliveries to customers paying circa-£125,000 will begin in 2027. The maker has plans for more models in due course – SUVs included – but the proposed launch rollout is an interesting one. I wish the company, its one-model (for now) range and its workers luck in 2027. They’re going to need a lot of it.

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