Jaguar Halo
Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2016 4:35 am
Last month, the British carmaker announced a plan to build a handful of 1950s XKSS sports cars, priced at a cool £1m each.
The car was, in 1957, Jaguar’s top model: a rare, expensive, headline-grabbing, barely legal racing car for the road.
In other words? A halo model. Steve McQueen owned one, and that car’s present value hovers around the $30m mark.
And this year, the XKSS will be a halo car all over again.
Jaguar’s last real halo car, the XJ220 of 1992, arrived to slightly less fanfare.
Motoring writers criticised its engine, its interior, even its puny boot.
The car originally wore a £470,000 price tag; today, decent examples are trading hands for only half that sum.
For a modern carmaker, building a halo model like the XJ220 is risky and expensive — really expensive.
Get it wrong (think Ferrari F50 or Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren), and wear it as a mark of shame for the rest of your days.
With its XKSS, Jaguar is taking a different approach to the halo car — one that's safer, but no less scintillating.
The reborn sports car isn’t a flashy vanity project with a bloated budget.
It’s an old car that’s already been designed, and it will be crafted using tools and techniques from the 1950s in a corner of Jaguar’s Heritage division workshop on Brown’s Lane in Coventry, a building no bigger than a typical light industrial warehouse.
In this small space, simpler vehicles from a simpler time — in which cars were built by hand, not by robots, and nary a smartphone-connected dashboard was to be found — are being built for a whole new generation.
