2000 Jaguar Xj8 Base Sedan 4-door 4.0l on 2040-cars

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The Jaguar XKSS, famed ride of King of Cool, is new again

You might remember earlier this year, when we told you Jaguar had confirmed that it would follow up the limited-run of continuation E-Types – completely new, built from scratch classics – with a new run of the impossibly cool XKSS. Those folks in Coventry weren't pulling our leg, because we're here in LA and the brand new XKSS is here, too. Actually, they're 60 years late. If you remember the story we told you when Jaguar said it'd be building these things, there were originally to be 25 cars in total. 16 were built, and the other nine were destroyed in a fire at the Browns Lane factory. Thus, nine original XKSS cars have been missing, and the nine XKSSs that Jaguar will build for a cool GBP1 million each will round out the initial production run. If you're not familiar with the XKSS, here's a little background. Jaguar won Le Mans three times in a row in a factory racer known as the D-Type. After withdrawing factory support in 1956, some privateers continued on with the car, but Jaguar didn't. That left several D-Types sitting about Browns Lane in various degrees of completion. Sir William Lyons had them converted to road spec, which involved adding such niceties as a windshield and passenger door, but otherwise they were not far removed from the Le Man-winning cars they were based on. That meant that they were, to put it mildly, a lot of car for the street. The kind of person an XKSS appealed to was stylish and adventurous, and someone who craved speed. Someone like Steve McQueen, perhaps. His old XKSS is sitting in the Petersen Museum in LA, which not-coincidentally is where Jaguar assembled us to see the wraps pulled off the new one. The "new" XKSSs are generally faithful to the original design, with the bodies hand-formed off bucks that were themselves created off an original XKSS. The body is made out of exotic magnesium, an extremely lightweight metal which is often misunderstood to be extremely flammable. It is, but much more so when it's in little pieces, like shavings; formed into a car body, it's not quite the incendiary device you might think it'd be. Even the processes to form the chassis is the same, such as the bronze welding technique used to bond its tubing. A few concessions to modern safety are fitted, however. There's a fuel cell, partly due to the additional safety it provides but also to better resist the harrowing effects of modern ethanol blend fuel.

Are you the soon-to-be-revealed Jaguar CUV concept?

Following the teaser of the Jaguar CX-17 Concept released last weekend, the first official image of the Jaguar crossover concept appears to have hit the Internet ahead of its introduction at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
Assuming this is the real deal, the tall, upright front end removes any doubt that this is anything but a preview for the upcoming Jaguar crossover, which will likely be called either the XQ or the Q-Series. Reports suggest that Jag's first-ever CUV is likely to go into production in 2016, and it will bring with it the option for a Jaguar-developed four-cylinder engine replacing the current mills still sourced from former parent Ford.

Lightweight E-Type to show historic side of Jaguar Special Operations in Monterey

Jaguar has made a lot of great vehicles over the years, but as far as historians are concerned, it still very much lives in the shadow of the original E-Type, small as it was. In its image, Jaguar has made two generations of XK and the new F-Type, but what we have here is the most faithful continuation of the E-Type heritage yet.
Alongside the Range Rover Sport SVR and the F-Type Project 7 (making its US debut), Jaguar Land Rover and its new Special Operations division will roll into Pebble Beach this year with the continuation Lightweight E-Type. Of the 72,500 E-Types which Jaguar built between 1961 and 1975, only a dozen were Lightweight versions, and they remain the most coveted E-Types of all. It originally planned on building 18 examples, though, and five decades later, it's now committed to completing that original production run in faithful detail.
The Lightweight E-Type was based on the standard roadster and was homologated as such, just with some key upgrades to make it lighter and faster. The biggest change, of course, was the lightweight aluminum bodywork that cut 205 pounds off the curb weight. To replicate it, Jaguar took the last example (the only one made in 1964 after the original eleven were made in '63), scanned half its body surface, mirrored it to ensure symmetry and set about reproducing it with the same standard of materials available in the Sixties (and resisting the urge to go with more modern grades of aluminum). 75 percent of the 230 components are made in-house, with the largest stampings outsourced and built on machinery built to Jaguar's specifications off-site.