The next classic Jaguar sports car?
I remember the launch of Jaguar’s second-generation ‘new’ XK very well. At the time I was working in the press and marketing team at General Motors, and the X150 stole many column inches from the Vauxhall/
Opel Astra TwinTop that we were whipping the hanky off across the hall.
While GM’s bosses were seething at being comprehensively upstaged, I was intrigued by the sharply styled new Jaguar. A mini-Aston Martin with an edgy new styling approach, it was a far cry from the XK8 it replaced. With its hunched arches and sinewy curves, the 1990s XK was a handsome brute, but also a very traditional one.
Fergus Pollock’s masterpiece was one of the finest-looking Jaguars in a generation, so the new model had big shoes to fill. And whilst it was undeniably a handsome car, I wasn’t convinced.
In some respects, it was just too modern. Even as a child in the 1980s, my fondness for Jaguars was stoked by their old-fashioned styling. Jaguar was a company that did retro before retro was cool, and it did it with such style and panache that it managed to market curvaceous saloons and sports cars while everyone else was making wedges and squares.
The new XK was (to a 28-year-old me in 2005, at least) a little bit too ‘everyone else’. It was a lovely sports car, but an indifferent Jaguar. It was also marketed differently, too. Instead of the press releases celebrating its heritage and its ‘Jaguarness’, the media blurb zeroed in on its pedestrian protection, under-bonnet airbags, digital touchscreens and rotary gear selectors. This was the mid-2000s. The dawn of a digital revolution that would transform in-car technology, but at the same time dilute some brand identity.
But that was over 18 years ago, and while I still tend to be a bit of a late adopter where technology is concerned, I accept that touchscreens and centrally controlled vehicle settings are no longer new-fangled, and that the systems inside an X150 XK are generally quite clunky compared with the latest and greatest. That’s fine. As a rule, they all still work and the built-in obsolescence I feared they might have hasn’t affected the XK’s evolution from modern sports car to neo-classic.
Because, like it or not, I have to accept that it’s on the verge of being a classic where the X150 now currently sits, in the same way that I have evolved during its lifetime from being a young man to being middle-aged. And that, you see, is what fires nostalgia.
Today, a lot of people buying X150s are my age. Folk who wanted one in their late twenties but couldn’t aff
