THROUGHOUT ITS life, the Jaguar XJ has always been something of a giant-killer, able to offer an often unbeatable package of pace, handling and refinement which was regularly the equal of cars costing far more. Indeed, once the XJ12 had been revealed, there were many who felt that Rolls-Royce and by extension its badge-engineered Bentley sibling brand was finally outclassed.
Amazingly, as Rolls/Bentley’s struggle to update its products saw it enter the 1980s with the Silver Spirit which was essentially a rebodying of the 1965 Silver Shadow, the Series 3 incarnation of the Jaguar XJ – itself an ageing design by then – was still winning group tests in car magazines. In fact CAR memorably decided that the ‘Best car in the world’ was in fact the luxury-spec Daimler iteration of the Jaguar saloon and not Crewe’s finest.
That was perhaps a low point for the Crewe brands, starved of investment and increasingly propped up by the bizarre bespoke creations demanded by the Brunei royals, while Jaguar prospered under the command of John Egan as an independent and then found new life as a Ford subsidiary.
By the turn of the new century, Ford money had seen Jaguar expand into the volume segment with the S-Type but had also seen the range-topping XJ take on a new credibility with its state-of-the-art V8 engine and much improved quality.
Over in Crewe meanwhile, things had taken a curious turn as Rolls-Royce Motors first embraced BMW to supply componentry for the Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph and Bentley Arnage and then ended up the subject of a bidding war which saw the entire company acquired by arch rival the Volkswagen Group.
