Jaguar’s new head of design has taken a thinly veiled swipe at rivals such as BMW for going “overboard” with “fairly crude” front-end styling.

Speaking to CarThrottle, Julian Thomson, Jaguar's newly appointed director of design, noted many automakers had come up with their “future design languages with a big consideration towards China”.

“China’s a first generation of car owners, or second-generation now, and they have been quite brand obsessed, [but] not knowing what brand was what,” Thomson said.

“So a lot of manufacturers have reacted to this by doing very strong faces on their cars, just to get known.”

Without actually mentioning BMW’s latest big-grille design strategy, Thomson said “I feel some of our competitors have gone really overboard in trying to overemphasise the brand, the face of the car, and in a fairly crude manner in a lot of cases”.

Thomson went on to call out competitors for “doing faces only a mother could love”, adding Jaguar would never “torture the metal” in such a way.

“Premium brands like ourselves do need to have design languages that are much more cohesive and recognisable, but at Jaguar we’re not going to be funky, we’re not going to do these big faces.

“We’ve really got to make sure Jaguar has some real integrity and civility about it,” Thomson told the publication.

Original article from Car