1989 Jaguar Xj6 Base Sedan 4-door 3.6l on 2040-cars

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Ian Callum makes the Jaguar C-X75 concept street-legal

Unveiled at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, the Jaguar C-X75 could have been one of the British brand's wildest and coolest models. It received the green light for production, got canned, and resurfaced in the 2015 James Bond movie Spectre before disappearing for good. However, not everyone has forgotten it: Callum, the design firm founded by former Jaguar design boss Ian Callum, has made a C-X75 street-legal. Precisely how Callum's customer ended up with a C-X75 remains a mystery. The example modified is one of the four surviving stunt cars built by Williams Advanced Engineering for Spectre, so it might be the one that auction house RM Sotheby's offered at its Abu Dhabi sale in November 2019. The car was estimated to sell for anywhere between $800,000 and $1.2 million; it ended up not selling during the auction. Regardless, Callum was the right person to take on the Herculean task of making an obscure, experimental supercar street-legal, as he led the team that designed the model. His company made hundreds of small but significant changes including replacing the glass, adding a quieter exhaust with catalytic converters, making tuning changes to the supercharged, 5.0-liter V8, and fitting additional switches inside. Interestingly, the stunt cars were built with foam door mirrors. These had to be replaced with real mirrors fitted with turn signal repeaters. The team also took advantage of the tear-down to make visual improvements, such as reducing and aligning the panel gaps. The C-X75 received a new coat of paint, and engineers made changes to the suspension system — they notably adjusted the ride height. It helps that this version of the C-X75 uses an engine already approved for road use; the V8 has powered the Range Rover, among other cars. Callum's street-legal Jaguar C-X75 will make its public debut at the Bicester Heritage Scramble event held in England on April 21, 2024. Related video: Featured Gallery Ian Callum's street-legal Jaguar C-X75 Aftermarket Jaguar Coupe

Xcar drives Jaguar C-X75, other Spectre villains of 007

James Bond returns to US theaters very soon in Spectre, and with the action-packed film wrapped, the producers are lending out the keys to some of the movie's automotive stars. We've already seen Jay Leno behind the wheel of Bond's Aston Martin DB10. Now, Xcar's Alex Goy has taken a turn in some of the flick's villainous rides from Jaguar Land Rover, including a very special Jaguar C-X75. The crew from JLR's Special Vehicle Operations team certainly did an impressive job of giving the movies baddies some appropriately nefarious rides. To challenge Bond, they turned the Land Rover Defender into a beast with chunky, off-road tires and blinding-spot lights. They also made the Range Rover Sport SVR even more diabolical than normal with a blacked-out look and LED lightbar. Of course, the king of Spectre's villain cars is the C-X75. According to Goy, most of the ones in the movie use the company's 5.0-liter, supercharged V8, but two are actually original prototypes with the hybrid setup. He gets to drive one of those special examples in this clip. While limited to some low-speed cruising, the coupe still looks wonderfully menacing on the road. Related Video:

Junkyard Gem: 1984 Jaguar XJ6

The original Jaguar XJ first appeared in American showrooms for the 1969 model year, after an excruciatingly long development process that included a final-innings merger of Jaguar's parent company with a manufacturer of heavy-duty vehicles. And then Jaguar used that same basic platform for various iterations of the XJ until the last V12-engined cars hit the showrooms for 1992. Six-cylinder XJs switched to the new XJ40 platform for 1988, however, which makes today's Junkyard Gem one of the later Series 3 XJ6s to hit our roads. This one was in very nice condition when it arrived in this Denver self-service yard recently, so be prepared for pain if you're an XJ lover (no, not the other kind of XJ). Just over 100,000 miles on the odometer, which is just over 2,700 miles traveled for each year of this luxurious saloon's life on the road. Other than some damage that I'm nearly certain was caused by junkyard shoppers, the interior is just about perfect. Most of the upholstery looks new, the door panels are pristine, and the wood trim isn't cracked. The only obvious flaws are some cracks in the dash pad and a bit of fraying on some leather here and there. Of course, the sun's glare is a little harsher in the Western United States than it is in Coventry, so you must expect some interior damage. It lived in Texas for a while during the early 2000s. There's a University of Wisconsin sticker on the rear window, so this car may have done a few cross-country moves during its life. How much did it cost new? The MSRP was $31,100 for the 1984 XJ6, which comes to about $90,435 in 2022 dollars. I was driving a 1968 Mercury Cyclone that cost $200 in 1984 dollars when this Jag was new, and a new XJ6 seemed about as far out of reach to me as an intergalactic starship (though beater early-1970s XJ6s were well within my price range— if not my wrenching skill-set— at the time). Anyone who has heard "Dead Man's Curve" knows that you just don't mess with the curves on Sunset Boulevard or with a Jaguar straight-six (the XJ was in the early stages of development when the song came out, so the narrator of the classic teen-tragedy song wrecks his Sting Ray while racing an XKE). This one displaces 4.2 liters and made 176 horsepower when new. The V12-powered XJ-S coupe had 262 horses, but cost $34,700 ($100,900 today).