\"A Jaguar has to have a saucer of view,\" says Jaguar organisation administrator Ian Callum as we walk around the sleek newborn 2010 XJ sedan. \"We can't do what everyone added has done.\"
The irony is, of course, that \"everyone else\" -- specifically, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi -- has spent the past quaternary decades processing a formula Jaguar itself established with the original 1968 XJ, building wood- and leather-lined luxury sedans with excellent performance and roadholding, and superlative comfort and refinement. But Callum's saucer is the Germans now so dominate the segment that Jaguar simply cannot do the variety of luxury car it has always finished and expect to be noticed.
\"We'd been drawn into their artefact of thinking,\" Callum says, \"and we wanted to get away from that.\"
The irony is, of course, that \"everyone else\" -- specifically, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi -- has spent the past quaternary decades processing a formula Jaguar itself established with the original 1968 XJ, building wood- and leather-lined luxury sedans with excellent performance and roadholding, and superlative comfort and refinement. But Callum's saucer is the Germans now so dominate the segment that Jaguar simply cannot do the variety of luxury car it has always finished and expect to be noticed.
\"We'd been drawn into their artefact of thinking,\" Callum says, \"and we wanted to get away from that.\"
The 2010 XJ is a rank repudiation of its predecessor. Well, almost complete: The new car's body-in-white is again made from lightweight aluminum, and a number of platform architecture elements and component sets are carried over from the old car. And after riding in a long wheelbase Portfolio version with Jaguar chassis guru Mike Cross at the wheel, it clearly has the same delicate, cat-like grace on the road. But everything you crapper see and touch is a time warp absent from the cloying back-to-the-60s environs of the terminal XJ.
The new XJ is defined by its dramatic swooping roofline and coupe-like greenhouse, architectural elements decided at the rattling beginning of the car's development program. Two generic package construct models, digit a traditional three-box sedan, and digit with a coupe-like profile, were shown to 100 potential customers in Los Angeles in New 2005. They overwhelmingly indicated the coupe-like construct was more appropriate for a Jaguar.
With that information in hand, Callum's team began nonindustrial theme models in early 2006. Seven different models, every coupe-like but with different surfacing and graphics, were narrowed to just threesome by mid-year. The production automobile is an phylogenesis of the most adventurous of the three.
The whole car's architecture hinges around the thin slope rails that bend rearward from the base of the windshield, says honcho program engineer Andy Dobson. Without them, the XJ's bunk would appear heavy, imperative down on slit-like windows as in the Chrysler 300C and Chevy Camaro. The sliding glass roof is a key enabling technology: Because it articulates up and over the top surface, it enabled Dobson's engineers to turn the thickness the roof -- and therefore the vertical height of the slope rails -- by an inch.
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