Nothing like a Daim
I’M SURE, like a lot of Jaguar fans, I’m not alone in lamenting the demise of the XJ saloon car range.
XJs, for me, were the very soul of Jaguar – a brand that made some pretty impressive sports cars and had its roots in performance motoring, but which moreover made the best saloon cars in the world. I’ve owned XJs of four generations, each one flawed, but all of them beautiful.
The appeal lies in the fact that every single generation of XJ was designed around the driver, to handle and ride as well as they possibly could, while at the same time exhibiting wonderful, often anachronistic styling. These were cars that were classics as soon as they left the showroom, something that’s reflected in the surge in values we’ve seen in recent times for Series models, XJ40s and – latterly – the X300/X308 models. People who own them cherish them. That doesn’t really happen with a lot of cars.
Don’t get me wrong. There were other luxury cars that were better built. The older Mercedes-Benz S-Classes were beautifully engineered and wonderful in their own right. In more recent times, the Audi A8 and Lexus LS were much better packaged and technologically more advanced. But the one thing they were all missing was the fundamental soul that makes a Jaguar a Jaguar.
With the death of the XJ (and, I must confess, I’m not a huge fan of the last of the breed compared with its predecessors), Jaguar has let go an essential strand of its DNA.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the need to change and evolve. I worked for over a decade inside a car manufacturer’s senior management team, and the one thing I learned above all is that if you don’t embrace change, you get left behind. Jaguar did embrace change. It kept its sports cars as they’re high-value, high-profit models, but the evolution of the executive car market into one that has a much greater focus on SUVs and alternative fuels meant that for a company with limited resources, following the herd made sense.
A NEW XJ WOULD HAVE BEEN A MONUMENTAL INVESTMENT IN BOTH TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE
A new XJ would have been a monumental investment in both technology and architecture, the latter of which would only have suited a large saloon car. And, like it or not, big saloons are out of fashion. That’s a trend that I hope won’t last forever.
In the meantime, Jaguar must follow a more diverse path in order
