A Jaguar XJ is the coolest vintage car you can actually afford to buy
IN THE 1960s and ‘70s, few sedans oozed ultra-cool style as the Jaguar XJ does. Long and slender, with liquid lines yawning from the limpid headlamps back to an elegantly tapered tail, they seemed to slither down the road like something from a naughty dream.
Jerry Hall, Tom Petty, and Frank Sinatra owned them. So did the royal family.
Owning one now can also be a nightmare.
Complications from rust damage, overheating issues, and cracked cables can spell hours stranded on the side of the road instead of tooling to a picnic or swishing through London streets to a night-time haunt. And if you try to go more modern by buying an XJ from the later generations of the 1980s and ‘90s, you’ll find that they lag, underpowered, comparable vehicles from BMW and Mercedes.
But since it broke away from former owner Ford in 2008, Jaguar has been back in a major way.
The brand, now owned by Tata Motors Ltd., has just produced an excellent allelectric SUV, the I-Pace and leads the field for value with the affordable, powerful, stylish, and fun-to-drive F-Type coupe and convertibles.
So it was from a position of confidence that the brand took a moment to reflect on its heritage-lovely and occasionally soft as it was-with the arrival of the latest iteration of the XJ.
This autumn, it launched the US$75,400 (RM317,000) 2019 Jaguar XJ sedan on the 50th anniversary of the car’s debut at the Paris Motor Show in 1968. Then it added context: Jag sprang all eight generations of the XJ line out of storage and put them on the road driving overnight from company headquarters in Coventry, England, to the Paris Motor Show.
This was especially daring because vintage Jaguar collectors and enthusiasts well know the ecstasy of loving such a stylish auto-in its day, the very top car for elegance and performance-and the agony of owning it 50 years later.
The potential for disappointment was high on the back roads as we drove from the Castle Bromwich Assembly Plant outside London through the Goodwood Motor Circuit, Saint-Malo Port, and Le Mans racetrack on the way to Paris. But Jaguar boldly set us off on that two-day quest, a group of writers and travelers, come what may. I respected the company’s confidence.
Our convoy included everything from a retro-cool 1978 XJ Coupe V12 and a long, four-door 1973 Daimler Double-Six Vanden Plas Limousine (Jaguar bought Daimler in 1960 and continued the line as an upscale trim level for Jaguar) to a 1988 Daimler 3.6 and the new US$122,400 Jaguar XJR575 sedan, which is as aggressive as any jungle cat you’d find in the wild, with the mean engine scream to boot. I loved it.
My favourite ride of the vintage group was the Series I. When it debuted at the Paris Motor Show in 1968, it was the last creation gift of Jaguar founder William Lyons. It had a 180-horsepower engine, a well-balanced body with fourwheel independent suspension, a then-ultra-modern automatic transmission, and luxurious details inside such as polished burled walnut doors and golden-filigree enamel-filled logos, enough to give anyone driving one a sense of occasion, even if the trip was merely to fetch milk down the road. They were so good the brand sold more than 250,000 of them in their 18-year generation.—