Click on the linked picture above to go to a newsy.com video about the C-X75, a new luxury super sports car to be made by Jaguar and sold for over a million dollars each - a luxury sports car powered by a hybrid electric engine. You can also find the written transcript together with the video at [ http://www.newsy.com/videos/jaguar-to-produce-1-million-hybrid-supercar ].
The C-X75 - from Jaguar, the luxury car maker now owned by India's largest conglomerate, Tata group - is an expensive car, with a price tag of over a million dollars each - but it LOOKS like it's worth every single dollar! Just checkout the photo slideshow below from "Jaguarcars" at flickr.com:
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
SOME EXTRA BACKGROUND:
Popular hybrid cars today are essentially gasoline powered cars that save on the amount of gasoline used by running on a special in-built electric motor when the special electric battery has enough charge.
The present top selling model of ALL cars in Japan, Toyota's Prius, is already a hybrid technology vehicle. The Prius is also the number one selling hybrid vehicle in the much larger U.S. market; however, the Prius, or any other hybrid vehcle for that matter, has yet to even enter the top 20 most popular models in th U.S., let alone challenge for the top position.
In this special project, Jaguar have called the famous British Williams Formula One motor racing team onboard, who will "provide their engineering expertise in areas including aerodynamics, carbon composite manufacture and hybrid technologies".
Jaguar itself had a Formula One Racing team under its own name from 2000 to 2004, during its ownership by the America's Ford Motor Company (1990-2008). Ford, sold Jaguar to Tata, India's largest business group, for $2.3 billion in June 2008 (making a loss, having originally purchased Jaguar for $2.5 billion way back in 1990), just prior to the great stockmarket panic later in that year. According to The Detroit News:
Ford bought Jaguar in 1989 for $2.5 billion -- far more than conventional wisdom held the brand was worth. It was widely viewed as a vanity purchase. Since then, Ford has invested about $10 billion in the brand, including a $1.2 billion bailout in 2005.So not only did Ford sell Jaguar for a lower price than it was bought 18 years prior, they also added $10 billion in investments, $1.2 billion in a bailout; and what is more, Jaguar is thought to have made a loss for Ford every single year of its stewardship prior to 2007.
Even in the year that Ford first offered for Jaguar, a newspaper in 1989 showed:
Jaguar's future alone was dim if not nil... The company was losing money, building only 50,000 cars a year..."In 1935, the Jaguar name first appeared on cars produced by in Coventry, England; although the company can trace its beginnings through the founder and long term Managing Director, Sir William Lyons, for more than ten years prior to that, in 1922. The company made a name for itself in sports cars.
In 1965, British Motor Corporation (BMC - which then held brands such as Austin, Morris and MG) bought a critical supplier to Jaguar, Pressed Steel, that fabricated bodyshells for Jaguar.
By now Lyons was nearing retirement, and did not have a viable succession plan within the company. His only son John had been killed in a car accident in 1955, and his other board members were of a similar age to himself. In addition, the bodyshells for Jaguar production were fabricated by Pressed Steel, a supplier critical to Jaguar Cars and now controlled by BMC.So in 1966, Jaguar was merged into BMC to become British Motor Holdings (BMH). But Britain's motor industry had already begun its long decline from the late 1950s. According to Wikipedia, the group that Jaguar belonged to, BMH, was struggling and the Government had to broker a merger just two years later in 1968, with another British motor giant, Leyland Motors, to form British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC). At this stage, BLMC was the last remaining major car manufacturer in Britain that was still in British hands. However, that mega-merger was not enough to make things better. Things got so bad that BLMC had later to be nationalized by the Government in 1975, changing its name slightly to British Leyland. The British group to which Jaguar was a member, "at one time held some 40 per cent of the British car market" and at one later stage shrunk to as little as 16%, according to CNN.
From the BMC perspective, Jaguar Cars was attractive because it was a success in the US market, and was thereby hugely profitable at a time when BMC lacked the funds to invest sufficiently in modern production facilities or new models. [source jaguar-enthusiasts.org.uk]
The Conservative powerhouse, and the first and only female Prime Minister of the U.K., Margaret Thatcher, came into power in 1979. In a series of large scale privatizations beginning in 1981, Jaguar was separated from its group and floated on the stockmarket in 1984, leading to its subsequent takeover by Ford in 1990 and eventually Tata in 2008. Throughout the troubled period of over 40 years from the 1960s through to 2008, perhaps Jaguar had not seen a period as profitable as back before 1966 when Sir William Lyons was still leading the corporation.
The brand may have been losing money for close to half a century of its 70 year history, but their cars sure look like a million dollars!
Some notes on the language:
Here is some vocabulary from the video which you may not have heard of before:
"wowed" - "Wow" is an informal word, an exclamation to show amazement, wonder etc. Its main classification is as an interjection. It is sometimes, as here in this video, used as a verb: "to wow", to impress others such as to cause amazement, wonderment etc.: "super-car that wowed spectators".
"hook-up" - This phrase is used in the video as a noun, meaning a connection of one entity to another entity: "(t)he Jaguar-Williams hook-up"... just as objects can be physically hooked up one to the other with a hook and chain/string.
"out-green" - This seems to be a newly coined phrase. "Green" is a an adjective, noun and sometimes a verb, associated with ecological and environmentalist issues - maybe because environmentalists love green trees. "Out" is sometimes used as a prefix, meaning to exceed in, or do or be more of something to a greater degree, such as in the words "outlast", "outdo", "outbid", "outgrow", "outgun", "outhit", "outpunch", "outlive", "outrun", "outperform", "outsmart" and "outspend". Thus to "out-green" is to be "more green" than others: "competition among automakers to out-green each other".
Practice your business English by watching and listening to the video above. For more detailed study, you can read the written transcript at the link given above.
Don't be scared if there is a lot that you don't understand. As long as you learn a little something new, then that is valuable: learning bit by bit is natural learning. By watching and listening, you will also be more exposed to, and more familiar with, various sentence structures and other language techniques used by English speakers.
I'll be happy to receive questions and comments from English learners, and I'll try to answer your queries here about the language in this video. I look forward to your comments!
[A rare opportunity for you to speak, practice, chat and learn English especially for business, finance, law, international economies & trade at the webpage for Mastery English by clicking on the Advisor button below.]
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