Jaguar's new XE is dressed to impress

The Jaguar XE will competing against Mercedes-Benz C-Class.

A few years ago I was at a dinner for the international launch of a new Mercedes-Benz.
Motoring hacks were spoiled at a posh hotel in Spain with Mercedes designers, press officers and, most importantly, engineers on hand to chat about their new coupe.

Image 1 of 24: The 2015 Jaguar XE goes on sale in NZ in the first half of next year.

I asked about the competition. So they speculated about what BMW was up to, and analysed Audi's push for growth. I mentioned Jaguar. Blank faces. Not a competitor; not even an irritant. An irrelevance. They were too polite to say so, but that much was obvious.

It was a bit embarrassing to have the storied name of Jaguar reduced to the status of conversation killer. We repaired to the bar.

Even now, with the successful launch of new, fresh-looking, reliable, solidly-built models, Jaguar isn't troubling the big German brands.

Tata, who took on an ailing Jaguar Land Rover from Ford, has invested billions in the group. And with significant results, at least so far as the products are concerned.

Brilliant designer Ian Callum was given a brief to move Jaguar out of dead-end styling, and he did, with great panache. He has made the cars visually match their often very advanced engineering.

Under Ford, it had been decreed that a Jaguar must look like a Jaguar always had - especially to an American customer - and so all Jags either resembled the original 1968 XJ or the 1959 Mark 2, the so-called Inspector Morse car.

Injury was added to styling insult when the baby Jag of the 1990s, the X-type, was also widely perceived to be based on the Ford Mondeo. The brand was saddled with an olde-worlde, old-man, old-school image. The marque was in trouble.

But the new generation XF sedan and F-Type cabrio and coupes all enjoy a new look, and are topping surveys of customer satisfaction and win rave reviews from the motoring press.

In global terms, the 60,000 or 70,000 cars Jaguar makes is nothing. Audi sell more cars in Britain alone than Jaguar makes for the whole world, while the Bavarians are knocking out 1.6 million BMW-badged cars a year.

The obvious answer for Jaguar is a car in the most-important and highest-volume sub-sector - the compact premium end, dominated and defined for so many years by the BMW 3-series. Mercedes-Benz's revived and accomplished C-Class is also doing good business. Hence the XE, and all the hopes vested in it.

Can it succeed? It looks the part - like the bigger XF and with similarly fashionable lines. Like some of its brothers it makes use of aluminium for strength, fuel efficiency and low emissions. And yet, it will find life very difficult, especially in the UK and Europe.

European, including British, buyers are, quite simply, dreadful badge snobs, and if it isn't "German" (even if it is put together in North Carolina with an engine from Birmingham) it just doesn't count. Deceased Saab and Rover were casualties of that attitude.

So the Americans are much more willing to consider new or revived brands such as Jaguar, which will be encouraging for the company in what is still its main export prospect. The same goes for the Gulf, China, Russia and other emerging markets.

If the Jaguar XE can start to overcome sniffy European buyers, it might just give the Germans something to discuss over dinner.

-Independent