Car Auto Magazine

Jag design finally breaks with the past.
BY BARRY WINFIELD, October 2007



View 2008 Jaguar XF Photo Gallery


Jaguar design director Ian Callum believes concept cars are often better at clearing out entrenched corporate design ideas than they are at setting new standards. He didn’t say so, but the obvious exception must be his own department’s C-XF show car that debuted in January at the Detroit show.

Although that vehicle used some creative license in its evocation of the latest Jaguar design language, it was not a million miles from what we see in this ’08 XF, which will replace the dated S-type early next year. However, Callum reminds us that there were 25 or 30 iterations of the C-XF design study before the evolution was complete, so perhaps that’s where the old fixations were purged.

He says the car follows an original edict of founder Sir William Lyons that Jaguars should be beautiful. Callum believes it’s a matter of proportion, surface purity, and detailing. We’d hasten to add that a dab of originality doesn’t hurt, because that’s where this car scores over the designs of previous Jaguar sedans. The XF abandons the old long-and-low rear-deck profile seen on most of the sedans in the Jag lineup, adopting instead a high rear decklid almost like that of a Lexus GS.

Except that the XF has a marked coupelike profile, with a steeply raked backlight. Impressive then, that the rear seat in this car offers as much leg- and headroom as it does. The front is roomy, too, in a huge departure from the old S-type’s interior, in which tall people found no comfort in either row. Callum admits it was hard work maintaining that profile in a five-seater.