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The UK votes for Brexit and it will impact automakers

It's the first morning after the United Kingdom voted for what's become known as Brexit – that is, to leave the European Union and its tariff-free internal market. Now begins a two-year process in which the UK will have to negotiate with the rest of the EU trading bloc, which is its largest export market, about many things. One of them may be tariffs, and that could severely impact any automaker that builds cars in the UK. This doesn't just mean companies that you think of as British, like Mini and Jaguar. Both of those automakers are owned by foreign companies, incidentally. Mini and Rolls-Royce are owned by BMW, Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata Motors of India, and Bentley by the VW Group. Many other automakers produce cars in the UK for sale within that country and also export to the EU. Tariffs could damage the profits of each of these companies, and perhaps cause them to shift manufacturing out of the UK, significantly damaging the country's resurgent manufacturing industry. Autonews Europe dug up some interesting numbers on that last point. Nissan, the country's second-largest auto producer, builds 475k or so cars in the UK but the vast majority are sent abroad. Toyota built 190k cars last year in Britain, of which 75 percent went to the EU and just 10 percent were sold in the country. Investors are skittish at the news. The value of the pound sterling has plummeted by 8 percent as of this writing, at one point yesterday reaching levels not seen since 1985. Shares at Tata Motors, which counts Jaguar and Land Rover as bright jewels in its portfolio, were off by nearly 12 percent according to Autonews Europe. So what happens next? No one's terribly sure, although the feeling seems to be that the jilted EU will impost tariffs of up to 10 percent on UK exports. It's likely that the UK will reciprocate, and thus it'll be more expensive to buy a European-made car in the UK. Both situations will likely negatively affect the country, as both production of new cars and sales to UK consumers will both fall. Evercore Automotive Research figures the combined damage will be roughly $9b in lost profits to automakers, and an as-of-yet unquantified impact on auto production jobs. Perhaps the EU's leaders in Brussels will be in a better mood in two years, and the process won't devolve into a trade war. In the immediate wake of the Brexit vote, though, the mood is grim, the EU leadership is angry, and investors are spooked.

Reliving the Jaguar XJ220 with a father-son duo

Jaguar may have canceled the C-X75 project, but there was a time when the Leaping Cat marque did make supercars. Sure, there were the XJR-9 and XJR-15 homologation specials made by TWR, but more famous was the XJ220. Although its reign may have lasted only a year before the McLaren F1 came along, for a brief time in the early 1990s, the XJ220 was the fastest car in the world – which is even more impressive when you consider that it was only powered by a 3.5-liter twin-turbo V6 when its rivals were using mostly V8s and V12s. That makes the XJ220 a rather noteworthy supercar from the dawn of the 200-mph era. The thing is, while Jaguar has come to embrace the XJ220 as an exceptional part of its history, it doesn't have the time or energy to devote to servicing the 275 that were made between 1992 and 1994. So it turns to Don Law Racing. The father-son team – made up of a master mechanic and his hot-shoe offspring – is tasked with keeping the XJ220 alive both in body and in spirit, and do so with a great deal of well-deserved pride. Drive went out to their workshop in Staffordshire to tell their story.

Jaguar Project 7 concept is an F-Type in a D-Type mold [w/video]

In addition to the XJR, XFR-S and XKR-S GT models Jaguar is bringing to the Goodwood Festival of Speed this weekend, the manufacturer announced that the F-Type-based, D-Type-inspired Project 7 design study will make its "dynamic" debut at the festival, with driving duties assigned to Mike Cross, Jaguar's chief engineer of vehicle integrity. Here's the cool part: With Jaguar's Director of Design, Ian Callum, leading the team responsible for Project 7, it went from the drawing board to track testing in only four months, Jaguar states, with a claimed 0-60 time of 4.1 seconds and top speed of 186 miles per hour.
Project 7, which was named in honor of Jaguar's seven wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, will be making runs up the hill at Goodwood over all three days of the festival, which starts at the Goodwood House in West Sussex, England, this Friday.
Far from a fragile concept car, Jaguar says, the single-seat Project 7 is a fully functional sports car. It uses the all-aluminum chassis and body of the F-Type, retains that car's 550-horsepower, supercharged 5.0-liter V8 and eight-speed automatic transmission but features lots of bespoke carbon fiber aerodynamic bits, some of which were inspired by the Le Mans-winning D-Type of the 1950s. The most obvious nod to that classic is the rear fairing with integrated rollover hoop - the F-Type's convertible top is gone. The windshield was also lowered, giving the roadster a more rakish silhouette as it sits on 20-inch forged-alloy wheels with carbon fiber inserts.