Jaguar XJ Is Back With Some Bite

JAGUAR has two emblems, and each is a version of its totemic animal. Their informal names, the Leaper and the Growler, suggest two aspects of the British company’s tradition. The Leaper is a long, lithe cat, usually seen as a hood ornament; it signifies feline grace. The Growler is a full-frontal cat face, its teeth bared aggressively; it represents raw power.

The Growler may be supplanting the Leaper at Jaguar, to judge from the company’s redesigned and radically different flagship sedan, the XJ, which was unveiled in London on Thursday.



The new XJ replaces a sedan — or saloon, as the British charmingly call it — whose basic shape had not changed since 1968. The old car’s proportions were like nothing else still on the road; it appeared as long and stately as its bloodline.



“The XJ completes the family,” Ian Callum, Jaguar’s design director, said in a telephone interview before the unveiling. The big sedan carries out design themes that Mr. Callum introduced on the 2007 XK sports car and on the 2009 XF midrange sedan.



Jaguar also has a new owner, Tata Motors of India, which bought the marque, along with Land Rover, from Ford last year. Jaguar’s ill-fated venture into cheaper cars, with the X-Type line based on the Ford Mondeo, is history. And in recent years Jaguar has vastly improved its ratings in consumer quality and satisfaction surveys by J. D. Power & Associates and others.

The new sedan has a Growler, not a Leaper, on the front. “Aggressive” is the word Mr. Callum kept using to describe the design. “We want Jaguars to be noticed again,” he said.

For years Mr. Callum told anyone willing to listen—and some, within his company, who were unwilling — that a Jaguar tradition is to alter tradition. “We should be brave,” he has said repeatedly.




Referring to the company’s legendary founder, Mr. Callum said: “Sir William Lyons wasn’t fearful of his heritage. It was his heritage, and he could do what you like with it. Part of that heritage is to keep moving forward.”

Everyone seemed to love the old XJ, but most Jaguar aficionados knew it had gone on too long. Over the years, the things that were new about the car — like the aluminum body that made its debut in 2003 —were invisible. What was visible was old.



(Jaguar says the aluminum body of the new sedan weighs no more than the steel body of a Mini, suggesting that the planned 6- and 8-cylinder engines should be able to move the XF with catlike quickness.)

Mr. Callum said Jaguar needed “to do what Lyons would have done — something new and fresh, something off-center, with style and presence and glamour.” For the new design, he added, “We wanted a modern car with modern proportions.”

The new XJ signals the end of Jaguar’s retro period, initiated by the late Geoff Lawson, Mr. Callum’s predessor. “We had to get away from oval grilles harking too literally to the past,” Mr. Callum said.

Not that the new car is without references to earlier models. The grille is inset like an air intake, evoking a racecar, Mr. Callum said. All Jaguars now feature the diagonal wire mesh of classic racers.

But the touchstone of the new design is a long, flowing roofline — and it is also the part of the design that may alienate traditionalists the most.

With its rakish rear window and side glass framed by a bold chrome parabola, the look is a striking departure from earlier XJs, though it is in keeping with coupelike four-door cars like the Mercedes CLS.

“We wanted a full five-passenger car, so we’ve moved the profile of the roofline rearward,” Mr. Callum said. He admitted to a visual trick: darkening the rearmost roof pillar to reduce its visual weight.

Mr. Callum also emphasized a horizontal look. Seen in profile, the body is expansive and barely ornamented. The side vents behind the front wheels are simple, horizontal lines, in contrast to the XK’s upright vertical crease.

The taillights are radically new — what Mr. Callum calls our “brave lamp graphic.” They suggest gothic arches, and indeed Mr. Callum referred to them as “cathedral window lamps.”

The XJ’s design was set before Tata took over Jaguar, and Mr. Callum said the design process had become simpler under the new owners. After years of dealing with layers of Ford management, he said: “In many ways we are our own bosses. We don’t have so many levels of approval to go through. The hierarchy is simpler. It is more entrepreneurial, and so my life has become more straightforward.

“Mr. Ratan Tata likes design and has a good design sense and comes in every month or so,” he added. “We have an enjoyable discussion.”

As for the Leaper, it hasn’t gone away, but has moved from the front to the rear. The famous hood ornament is partly a casualty of globalization, Mr. Callum said, since such protrusions are banned for pedestrian-safety reasons in many countries. The Leaper now appears silhouetted on the XJ’s raked rear end, a final bold brush stroke on the sheet-metal canvas.