2001 Jaguar Xk8 Base Convertible 2-door 4.0l on 2040-cars

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Watch the Chevy Corvette dismiss its Euro rivals at the hands of a Brit magazine

European auto writers, especially the British, have a bit of a reputation for favoring their own domestic cars over foreign rivals in comparison tests. Just think about how many times you've heard Jeremy Clarkson deify the latest product of UK loins while denigrating an American rival as a hopeless "Yank Tank." However, we have to tip our hats to the folks at Autocar because in its latest video comparing the 2014 Corvette Stingray to the Porsche 911, Jaguar F-Type V8 S and Audi R8, it's actually given the Vette a fair shake.
Autocar has put the Stingray through a battery of tests against what it considers to be the three best sports cars on sale in Europe today. And while the tests that it has chosen are somewhat random and subjective, it has concluded that the C7 can stand up against its rivals, even irrespective of its price. It's one thing to hear about how great the Stingray is from American writers, but it's great to know that not all Brits think we've gone crazy for calling the new Chevrolet "exquisite."
Scroll down to see how it all plays out on video.

Watch Felipe Massa put the Jaguar C-X75 through its paces

Automakers who run their own racing teams enjoy the benefit of having top-flight professional racing drivers on call to help out with development work. Jaguar, unfortunately, has no such racing team, having sold its F1 operation to Red Bull back in 2004. So when it came time to put the C-X75 through its paces in this latest video, it turned to Felipe Massa. Why Massa, you ask? For one thing, having driven for so long for Ferrari, the Brazilian driver is used to applying his F1 skills in testing a supercar designed for the road. But since switching to Williams, he hasn't been called upon in that capacity. For another, it was Williams Advanced Engineering as much as Jaguar itself that spearheaded development of the C-X75. So Massa was the natural choice. The C-X75, for those who don't recall, represented Jaguar's plan to build a hybrid hypercar of its own. Having debuted way back in 2010 at the Paris Motor Show, the concept followed hot on the heels of the Porsche 918 concept unveiled earlier that year in Geneva – a predated by far the emergence of the McLaren P1 and LaFerrari. The original design called for a revolutionary powertrain combining a pair of micro-turbines and four individual electric motors in the wheels. When that proved unfeasible, Jaguar switched to a more conventional setup with a turbocharged hybrid powertrain. Unfortunately plans to put even that version into production were shelved. But the concept was revived for the filming of the latest James Bond movie Spectre. Check out the C-X75 being put through its paces by the eleven-time grand prix winner in the video above. Related Video:

Junkyard Gem: 1994 Jaguar XJ12

While Americans were able to buy new Jaguar two-doors with V12 engines under their bonnets from 1971 all the way through 1996, availability of new Jaguar 12-cylinder sedans was much spottier here. The Series 1 and Series 2 XJ12s were sold here from the 1973 through 1979 model years, and then there was a grim Jaguar V12 four-door drought here all the way until the 1994 model year. Here's one of those very rare felines, found in a Northern California boneyard in April. Jaguar had developed the XJ40 successor to the Series 3 XJ over an agonizingly protracted period that spanned the British Leyland era of the early 1970s through the first production cars being shown to the world in 1986. The XJ40 first appeared in the United States as a 1988 model. The following year, the Ford Motor Company bought Jaguar. The engineers in Coventry struggled to design a viable V12-engined XJ40 for years, giving it the XJ81 designation. At long last, the XJ81 was revealed to the motoring world in 1993… just prior to the replacement of the XJ40 by the XJ300 for the 1995 model year. All of the XJ81s sold in the United States—just over 1,500 of them in all—were 1994 models. This junkyard provided a bonanza of rare European iron when I stopped by on that chilly spring morning. Located within a few rows of this one-year-only XJ81 were a Volkswagen Phaeton and a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. The yard also had a running Peugeot 504 for sale in their "builders" section, and I'll admit I was very tempted by it. The April 1994 production date indicates that this is one of the very last members of the XJ40/XJ81 family to be built (though Jaguar continued to use platforms derived from the XJ40 until the X350a arrived as 2003 models). This 6.0-liter engine was an excruciatingly tight fit in this engine compartment (there are semi-credible tales that the XJ40's engine compartment was made so narrow as a sneaky office-politics means of preventing British Leyland from installing Rover V8s in Jaguars), and working on it must be a mechanic's nightmare. Output was 301 horsepower and 336 pound-feet. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz's V12 was rated at 389 horsepower and 420 pound-feet, while BMW's V12 had 296 horsepower and 332 pound-feet. The MSRP for this car was $73,200 for the dual-airbag version (and we can see that both airbags were deployed in this car's career-ending crash). That amounts to $151,889 in 2023 dollars.