The beginner’s guide to Jaguar

Jaguar can trace its roots back to the Swallow Sidecar Company, founded in 1922 by Sir William Lyons. SS made – surprise! – sidecars for motorcycles, before producing its own actual, four-wheeled car in 1935: the SS Jaguar 2½ litre.

The company adopted the Jaguar name in 1945, selling off the sidecar business and focusing on sports cars powered by a straight-six engine designed before the war. The XK120, XK140 and XK150 formed a fairly delectable sequence through the Fifties before the Jaguar - the legendary E-Type - launched in 1961, with a bunch of luxurious saloons following it to help cement Jag’s place on British roads. And in motorsport.

If we’re talking dates, then 2008 is a biggie worth mentioning, too. That’s when Indian company Tata Motors bought out both Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford and smushed them together to form a supergroup even more successful than McBusted.

While the sidecar business began up in Blackpool, manufacturing moved to Coventry in the late Twenties which is where the first SS – and then Jaguar – cars were produced. The iconic Browns Lane plant opened up in 1951, which is where all those lovely sports cars were screwed together, before Jaguar production switched to Castle Bromwich in 2005.

Most of the current range continues to be made in the Midlands, alas (for those buying into the big cat for patriotic reasons) the manufacture of the E-Pace and I-Pace SUVs has branched out to the Magna Steyr plant in Austria, while other models have localised factories in China and India.

Jaguar sold 102,494 cars in 2020, down on the previous year (no need to tell you why…) and accounting for around a quarter of Jaguar Land Rover’s overall sales.

The fact Land Rovers dominate JLR’s sales stats ought to make it no surprise Jaguar appears to be slowly morphing into an SUV brand. The F-Type sports car, launched to such fanfare in 2013, is unlikely to be renewed when the brand goes all-electric in 2025. The plug-in XJ saloon has been canned too.

So expect the E-Pace, F-Pace and I-Pace to morph into (or be joined by) new crossovery things, as that’s clearly what the people want. For now, though, Jaguar continues to sell a couple of comfy but sporty saloon cars – the equally handsome XE and XF – as well as coupe and convertible F-Types. The I-Pace is its only fully electric car, but for how much longer?

As a side note, there’s also Jaguar’s SVO and Classic operations, which operate out of Ryton near Jag’s spiritual Coventry home and produce wildly expensive and rare specials – like the XKSS and C-Type continuations as well as the mad Project 8 saloon.

The cheapest is the XE repmobile, which nips in a whisker south of thirty grand, priced from £29,660 if you can stick to a wholly sensible diesel and resisting adding a single option. Given a rental-car sparse Ford Focus starts at about £23k, that XE seems like pretty good value to us. If your Gen Z eyes can't comprehend the three-box shape of a saloon, then the next cheapest Jag is the E-Pace crossover, which starts at a smidgen over £32,000.

The most expensive modern Jag is the Jaguar F-Type Heritage 60 Edition Convertible. Sure, it costs £127,500, but on a ‘letter-per-pound’ basis it’s considerably better value (at £3187 a character) than, say, an MG5 EV (£5019 a character). Never say we don’t deliver sparkling consumer advice.

Prefer your Jags new but old? Then you need one of those continuation classics. The company wouldn’t think of being so uncouth as to ‘declare prices’, but assume a million-quid payday answering questions from a former TGTV host to be the very least you need to secure an XKSS or C-Type.

Not only Jaguar’s fastest ever car, but the world’s fastest car for a short period in the early Nineties - both for its 213mph top speed and 7m46s Nürburgring lap time. In 2022 the XJ220 will turn 30 years old, which its slippery modern shape belies (and its swivel headlights perhaps don’t).

Maybe if the McLaren F1 hadn’t so quickly taken its world record, the XJ220 legend would be stronger. Equally if Jaguar had stuck with the V12 engine in the original concept rather than filling half the space with a Metro 6R4’s V6 turbo, maybe the big XJ would be surrounded by more fame than infamy.

Either way, those of us who dig cars know the XJ220’s very existence is cool. It survived a crippling recession, after all. What a shame the C-X75 concept car of 2010 didn’t get the chance to haul the Jaguar supercar into the modern age. More on that shortly...

It’d be deliberately obtuse of us to pick anything other than this, really. Without the E-Type sports car, launched in 1961, the very backbone of Jaguar’s heritage would be missing. Or a much less beautiful shape.

The mighty E is also right at the heart of one of the great motoring industry anecdotes, when Jaguar’s Bob Berry and Norman Dewis were told to ‘drop everything’ to drive a pair of E-Types – one coupe, one roadster – overnight from Coventry to Geneva to make the car’s big motor show reveal in time. They made it with 20 minutes to spare.

So while the 2008 takeover by Tata – and the subsequent conglomeration of Jaguar and Land Rover – is probably more vital in terms of the brand’s future, it’s easy to imagine the Jaguar legend simply never blazing as brightly without the E. And hey, without E-Types, there’d be no Eagles…

Much as in the last slide, we’d be deliberately obtuse to ignore this one, too. It's not that the X-Type was awful, more that it was an exceedingly safe bet from a company that exuded glamour and derring-do - one of these would never have been driven at the speed of light through Europe mere hours before its global unveiling.

Natively front-wheel drive and tangibly borrowing just a little too much from Jag's then parent company, Ford, it couldn't help but feel like a number-crunching car above all else. Its spiritual successor - the rear-drive XE - is significantly more inspiring to look at and drive, but has made barely a dent in 3 Series or C-Class sales, perhaps as a hangover from X-Type ennui.

Though for proof the X-Type is merely a sensible car rather than an outright sad one, Her Maj the Queen has owned several X-Type estates and has been freqently papped driving them. Let's move onto the next slide before we're sentenced to a lifetime chained up in the Tower...

Jaguar putting a diesel engine in the deliberately – perhaps overtly – retro S-Type was surprising enough in itself. TGTV putting said diesel Jaguar in the hands of a German racing driver called Sabine Schmitz was perhaps more of a shock.

That she then took it spectacularly close to the nine-minute mark on a lap of her spiritual home – the Nordschleife – not only earned Schmitz the love and respect she so richly deserved, but perhaps injected some sorely absent credibility into the S-Type. The car was a curious bridge between Jag’s past and its future, with styling that fit neither era.

The rest is, of course, history. Jag went on to make much more beautiful cars while Sabine eventually became a host on the telly show she’d made such a glorious little cameo on. We miss her.

Jaguar’s made a number of truly beautiful concept cars, but going for one of its more recent – the jaw-dropping C-X75 – is a no-brainer. Not for its glorious styling, nor the gas turbines that extended the range of its batteries… but because it represents a story of resurrection. A story of an overly ambitious concept car that was canned but then reborn with an actual use. Namely as the baddie’s car in a James Bond film.

Alright, the highly futuristic electric’n’gas powertrain was gone, replaced by a supercharged 5.0-litre V8. That was paired with a six-speed sequential race ‘box while the suspension was akin to a rally car’s. All the better for allowing the C-X75 to thump and slide its way through the cobbled streets of Rome on the tail of the equally bespoke-for-Bond Aston Martin DB10.

We’re sad Jaguar never got to add a curiously powered chapter to its small but thrilling supercar history. But we’re glad the C-X75 got to do so much more than twirl around on a turntable for two weeks of the 2010 Paris motor show.

Jaguar has dabbled in a heck of a lot of motorsport, and the less said about its Formula One venture the better. So let’s instead head to northwest France and the Le Mans 24 Hours, where the big cat is the fourth most successful carmaker of all time (behind Porsche, Audi and Ferrari).

Now we’re there – inhaling the smell of fries, stale beer and sweaty tents – lets rewind our clocks back to 1988. Not only because it’s a time before stag dos ruled La Sarthe, calming those odours just a tad, but because it allows us to witness the stunning Silk Cut* Jaguar XJR-9 taking the chequered flag at the world’s most famous endurance race.

Behind the wheel were Jan Lammers, friend of TG Andy Wallace and the late Johnny Dumfries. The XJR-9 took the spoils by a whisker, Lammers holding it in fourth gear after transmission problems. Not that the estimated 50,000 Brits in the stands cared overly much about the margin of victory…

*Cigarettes aren’t cool, kids, no matter what this lurid V12 racecar tries to bark in your ear