Night rider

THE STREETS were dark with something more than night,” wrote the detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler in The Simple Art of Murder, about the harshness of post-war Los Angeles. But what’s making the streets darker tonight isn’t lawlessness (this is Peterborough in 2020, after all), but a 2005 S-TYPE. With its big wheels, butch stance and sporty appearance, the face lifted model has always been a tough, slightly menacing car, the kind that looks best when driven on empty streets late at night.

But that wasn’t always the case.

When the S-TYPE made its debut at the 1999 British Motor Show, it was a handsome, albeit overtly traditional, midsized executive saloon. Heavily influenced by Jaguar’s saloons of the Sixties – the oval grille and twin headlights especially – the clichéd retro design,