LIVING WITH
The Jaguar V12 may be a safer bet than any other 12-cylinder car engine but you still need to know what you’re getting into when committing to life with an XJ12 or a Double Six
THERE’S SOMETHING wonderfully extravagant about having three times the regular number of cylinders under your bonnet. Nobody has ever needed 12 cylinders in their car, yet it’s nice to know you can have it, while the engineering ingenuity which makes it possible is a wonderful thing to contemplate, even as you sit in traffic burning fuel at the rate of 8mpg.
For most of history a V12 engine was something you only found in sports cars – and properly exotic ones, too. Until, that is, Jaguar made V12 power affordable to the merely wealthy rather than the super-rich.
Fitting the V12 to the E-Type and later the XJ-S gave them the credibility to challenge the best Italy could offer, but installing it in the XJ saloon created an entirely new breed of car. Indeed, it would be several decades before BMW and Mercedes caught up, while Rolls-Royce had to wait until the Silver Seraph in 1999 and even then only got a hand-medown BMW engine. Bentley had to wait even longer, not gaining 12 cylinders until the Continental GT arrived in 2003, powered by a pair of siamesed VR6 motors.
The XJ12 first appeared in the Series 1 car in 1972, continuing into the Series 2 generation and proving so popular that when the Series 3 XJ was replaced by the XJ40 in 1986, the older model was kept in production until 1992 purely to retain a 12-cylinder car in the range since British Leyland politics meant the XJ40 hadn’t been engineered to accommodate it.
With the Series 1 XJ12 now a niche collectible and the Series 2 cars the rarest of all, it’s most likely a Series 3 model you’ll be looking at if you’re shopping for an XJ12.
Offering a classic style lacking in the more modern Mercedes S600 or BMW 750i, while also being a lot easier to own than the mighty complexity of the Bentley W12 engine, it’s quite possibly the easiest 12-cylinder saloon you could choose to live with. As you might reasonably expect though, it needs more attention than a modern XJ, so here’s what you need to know.
BODY
If there’s one thing the Series XJs do well, it’s dissolve in the British climate and even with the better quality control introduced under John Egan from 1980 the British Leyland influence is still there.
A few years ago, a ropey XJ12 was easy to spot from a distance thanks to terminally tatty bodywork but these days the real rotters have either been weighed in, restored or turned into kit cars, meaning the surviving examples all look at a glance to be respectably solid.
This means you can more easily be fooled though and shiny paintwork can hide a multitude of issues which can easily balloon into big expense thanks to patchy panel suppl
