Jaguar XJS - the best Jaguar car ever made?

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Jaguar XJS

The E type was always going to be a hard act to follow and when the XJS came to market in 1975 as Jaguar’s priciest ever production car, people had high hopes and for some, the XJS didn’t hit it.

But it would be lazy to say ‘oh some people don’t like it and that’s that, because the XJS was so much more than just another car off the Jaguar production line.

In total, there were just over 115,000 of the XJS’ made in total and a spot of trivia, is that 1989 was the best year of sales with just over 10k sold in the year, which might’ve been partially influenced by Royal appeal: Princess Diana was often spotted in her 87 model.

It is also the longest lived Jaguar with the longest time spent in production at time of making this video.

Going back to where it began, the XJS’ early design was the work of a man called Malcolm Sayer, who for me, is such an important part of Jaguar’s history and I’ll tell you why I think that.

Companies like Tatra had been doing Aerodynamics since the 30s and Sayer, who was involved with the E Type as well as the XJ-S, was the man who really flew the flag for Aerodynamics and raised the importance of it. Sayer introduced things like Slide Rule and 7 Figure Log Tables to work out the formulae for drawing curves - prior to this - Jaguar had used clay modelling to determine shape and style.

The XJS went through many tweaks after launch in 1975 and in today’s video we are mainly concentrating on talking through the XJS post 1991 facelift, with a view to discussing pre-facelift in a totally different video once a great example has been located.

The 1991 facelift actually came about not because they wanted to keep the model going well into the 90s, but because the replacement, the XJ41, simply wasn’t ready. The facelift was also the first car to be launched under Ford’s ownership of Jaguar, so a lot of eyes were on the final car to see how it would be perceived and how it would perform.

The new and improved XJS was competing in a new market to its 1975 launch model - it was really competing hard with international competitors like like the 8 Series E31 and the SL R129.

If you’ve seen a pre-facelift example you’ll note there are plenty of cosmetic exterior changes in additional to changes inside the cabin like the seats, the wooden trim and the seats. However, the real changes weren’t immediately detected by the naked eye - of the 490 panels making up the car, 180 were new or modified.

And the 4 litre AJ6 engine, which is what’s fitted to the car we’re testing today was lifted from the XJ40.

And as a side note, if you’re peeking under the bonnet of a 1994 onwards car and it’s different to this and it’s silver with the Jaguar lettering running down the centre with 4 litre printed on, that’s the AJ16 engine.

In the book Jaguar all the cars, which I’ve used a lot for research for this video, The AJ6 engine is quoted as being capable of 0 to 60 in 7.4 seconds, but I believe that’s paired with a manual gearbox.

All in all, the facelift cost 50 million pounds and of the 115k cars sold, nearly 22k of these were the new facelift variant XJS.

Production ran until 1996 and the car was then retired off to be replaced by XK8.