What a shame we missed out on this 2004 Jaguar concept

This delightful looking confection is the curiously named BlackJag concept from the 2004 Geneva motor show. A golden year, that one, with debuts from the Fiat Multipla, Mercedes CLS and Seat Altea. It’s a Jaguar concept car, but it wasn’t made by Jaguar. If you hadn’t guessed as much already.

Police were initially confused, because no design group came forward to claim responsibility for the concept. Jokes, it was supposed to be an industry handshake for a new design consultancy called Fuore, based in Barcelona. It was run by an experienced designer called Erwin Himmel. 

Austrian car designer Erwin Himmel made a name for himself at Audi, working there between 1982 and 1994 and penning some of the brand’s iconic late Eighties, early Nineties models. Audi 80? Audi 100? Boom. He was then asked by the Volkswagen Group to set up an external design centre called Design Centre Europe, which fed designs in across VW, Audi, Skoda and Seat. 

We’re not sure. The press release that went out with the car described it as an “exhilarating design study”, which fused the “spirit of Formula One with the values of the traditional British brand”. Given that Jaguar itself never quite managed to fuse with F1 this was quite a tall order. And the end product looks more like an Audi R8 fused with bits of every sports car on sale at the time. 

Sorry to scare you with the picture, but once you see the family resemblance you won’t be able to unsee it again – one of Fuore’s successful partnerships in the mid-2000s was with Subaru, including working on the design for the 2005 B9 Tribeca, widely regarded as one of the best-looking SUVs of the period thanks to its timeless elegance and sharp lines. 

The BlackJag concept was a two-seater convertible with the reddest interior you’ve seen since that dead badger on the A1 the other week. Bucket seats and silver detailing create a suitably sporty ambience. One detail that the BlackJag nails is the rotary gear selector, which would appear on the 2008 XF and become a Jaguar mainstay for almost a decade.  

The engine was probably the spiciest prospect on the BlackJag concept – the car was put together with a centrally mounted 7.0-litre V10 engine in mind, producing 640bhp. This would have made it capable of the 0–62mph run in 3.8 seconds and a top speed of 210mph. 

This is only conjecture, but we suspect a combination of the fact that it wasn’t really a Jaguar, its looks and the mooted £2m price tag were deciding factors in the BlackJag concept not making it through to series production. We might look back now and see the 2006 XK as a bit of a conservative design, but it hit the spot at the right moment for the company. And hey, it could have ended up looking like the BlackJag.