TECH
We chart the history of the engine which brought Jaguar into the modern era
I T’S THE sort of nugget you have to read a couple of times before it sinks in, but it’s true: the AJ-V8 engine debuted in the XK8 in 1996 was only the fourth all-new Jaguar engine in the marque’s history. The very earliest cars had used bought-in engines, with the XK being Jaguar’s first in-house design, followed by the legendary V12 and then the AJ6, later developed into the AJ16.
It was worth the wait though, since time has shown the AJ [‘Advanced Jaguar’] V8 to be one of the world’s great engines, both powerful and reliable as well as delivering specific power output to rival the very top of the (mostly German) class.
Initial work on a new engine family had begun in the era of the XJ40 when strategic thinking had embraced the idea of a smaller car to sit below the XJ and the idea of a ‘modular’ design had been floated, which could share sufficient features to offer production economies when produced in straight-six, V12 and V8 formats.
“We considered all types of alternative line-ups, from V10s and 4.0-litre V12s, flat eights and flat sixes, to straight-sixes and V6s. We gradually narrowed these down to a possible three-engine range of V6, V8 and V12,” powertrain chief David Szczupak told us back in 2016. “AJ26 was the code name – the number was simply the addition of 6, 8 and 12.”
In time the decision was taken to produce a V6 in place of an inline six and by the late 1980s a dedicated development team was established, with the brief being to have a running engine by 1991.
Given that Ford Motor Company had instigated cost-cutting initiatives immediately after acquiring Jaguar, it was perhaps surprising that its Coventry subsidiary wasn’t encouraged to use an existing engine from elsewhere within the FoMoCo empire, but Ford’s new ‘modular’ V8 as found in the Mustang, was physically too large to fit in the engine bay of the XJ40-derived X300 or the XK8 then in development and would in any case have struggled to meet specific output targets.
Additionally, modern it may have been but the Ford engine wasn’t quite up to the demands of the prestige market in Europe, which had been taken up a notch first by BMW’s long-awaited V8s and then thoroughly shaken up by the uncanny refinement of Toyota’s 1UZ-FE V8 as used in the Lexus LS400.
Luckily for Jaguar, simple arithmetic at Board level suggested that modifying the X300 and XK8 to accommodate the Ford engine would be more costly than developing a bespoke Jaguar unit, not to mention the clear benefits from the Jaguar brand being seen to use its own powerplant.
