Jaguar 1966 Xke Right Hand Drive 2+2 Coupe Body Shell on 2040-cars

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Evil Brits star in Jaguar's first-ever Super Bowl commercial

Chrysler's Imported from Detroit commercial from Super Bowl XLV is one of the most powerful car commercials in recent memory, and Jaguar is taking a similar approach - albeit with a more villainous spin - for its first-ever Super Bowl spot titled Rendezvous. While Chrysler and Eminem focused on hometown cheerleading, Jaguar is using its $8 million (the going rate for a 60-second commercial in this year's game) to play up the Hollywood tradition of typecasting a Brit as the bad guy.
In the spot highlighting the all-new F-Type Coupe, Jaguar looked to director Tom Hooper (the man behind movies like The King's Speech and 2012's Les Misérables), who filmed on location in London with British bad guy actors Mark Strong, Ben Kingsley and Tom Hiddleston. As the commercial implies, Brits make perfect bad guys with their style, sound and power, which are all traits evident in the F-Type.
The commercial will air in the fourth quarter of this Sunday's game, but you can watch it now in the video posted below. Jaguar has also included a press release as well as a second behind-the-scenes video showing how the ad was made.

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.

Jaguar design boss admits X-Type was a mistake

History has a way of repeating itself, especially in the auto industry. When Jaguar was owned by Ford, the British brand attempted to field a competitor for the BMW 3 Series, called the X-Type. Based on the bones of a Ford Mondeo, it aped the styling of Jaguar's flagship model, the XJ, while borrowing liberally from the Ford parts bin. That was 2001.
Now, in 2013, Jaguar is planning a new 3 Series challenger based on the platform previewed by the C-X17 Concept, while Ford is attempting to take the latest Mondeo upmarket. The moves have both brands recognizing where, why, and how the X-Type failed. "It didn't look mature or powerful or anything. It was just a car," Jaguar's current head of advanced design, Julian Thomson, told PistonHeads. Basing the X-Type on a front-drive car while giving it styling that was meant for a rear-driver lead to proportions that "were plainly wrong," Thomson told PH. Ford's European head of quality, Gunnar Herrmann, added that the X-Type was "a fake Jaguar, because every piece I touch is Ford."
For what it's worth, the X-Type's successor in the segment will sport rear-drive, with plenty of input from Ian Callum. Thomson described the new model, which would challenge the 3 Series as having, "Big wheels right to the ends of the car, low bonnet, short overhangs, very low cabins." Sounds good to us.