SPY PICS: Jaguar XE takes shape

These spy pics taken during cold-weather testing of the Jaguar X-TYPE’s long-awaited successor, the XE, depict a vehicle not too dissimilar to the production model, according to the car-maker’s chief exterior designer Matt Beaven.

Jaguar revealed a teaser image of its all-new mid-size luxury sedan at last week’s Geneva motor show, where it confirmed the XE name we pre-empted last September.

Speaking to motoring.com.au in Sydney this week, Beaven said the latest spy shots were indicative of the XE’s mould-breaking fastback styling, which was reportedly locked in last year.

While previous spy shots exposed camouflaged body mules resembling the larger XF sedan, these images from a frozen lake in northern Sweden show the ground-breaking new shape with which Jaguar’s smallest sedan will enter production.

“We see that [the XE] now on the road with all the camouflage… you can understand the proportions a bit more,” he said.

While Beaven did not give much else away about Jaguar’s vital new BMW 3 Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class competitor due on sale next year, he did confirm it would eschew the retro design of the unsuccessful X-Type.

“We try to be quite general about the things we push through now, so it doesn’t restrict us. So you if you start to say ‘you need to have this line through here… suddenly you’ll be doing retro cars because all the cars will look the same.”

“You try to look back at what [Jaguar founder] Sir William Lyons wanted and try to understand what he really wanted a Jaguar to be. It was all about this very simple statement with beautiful proportions.”

Some of those ‘beautiful proportions’ were revealed in the first official teaser studio image of the XE and pictures of its all-new chassis structure last week.

Given that a car’s front-end is the most important element when it comes to brand recognition, it’s no surprise that Jaguar released a back-lit studio image of a red XE’s front-end. Beaven said that in the past Jaguar perhaps didn’t get this right.

“If you think back about 12 years ago, Jaguars all had a different grille on them. It was very confusing to anyone who wasn’t a Jaguar lover because if you’re a Jaguar lover you know where they come from.

“If you’re not, it’s just confusing. We retail cars all over the world now, so we want make sure that the message is clear.

“At the front, we have to be a bit more literal. We were inspired by the XJ. We have tried to get a family face so people see it and recognise it as a Jaguar.

“But we don’t want to do a cookie-cutter approach where you just scale the face for each car. You see the F-TYPE has a very unique personality -- we softened the grille slightly for the sports intent of it, we changed the lights so it has its own character. Hopefully people will see it and know it as a Jaguar.”

As the teaser and spy pics indicate, the XE’s Jaguar identity will continue in the same vein as the XJ, XF and F-TYPE, with far more subtle signature lines than the Coventry models built between the 1980s and early 2000s.

Where the production model is most likely to depart from the images you see here is around the C-pillar, where the frame structure images Jaguar released at Geneva indicate a more fastback style than the notchback the camouflaged car wears.

Jaguar’s new small sedan, known internally as Project X760, will replace the 2001-2009 X400-series X-Type, one of the last cars designed before current Jaguar design head Ian Callum began toning down the excessively retro Jaguar designs typified by the X-Type and S-Type.

Beaven summed up the new Jaguar approach to design.

“We want people to say ‘I’ve seen something, I don’t know what it is but it looks Jaguar. It looks beautiful’. If we’ve done that, we’ve done our job.”

Jaguar has said its C-X17 SUV concept, which is expected to become the brand’s first production SUV in 2016, shares its new lightweight aluminium platform architecture – codenamed iQ[Al] -- with the XE and both models are expected to be available with rear- and all-wheel drive.

However, Beaven clarified that this does not mean the two vehicles will share the same floorpan and wheelbase.

“The idea behind the C-X17 is really about showing how this architecture is adaptable, to show the extent to which we can adapt this architecture. It is isn’t about wheelbase, it’s about having an architecture that you can really expand on”

Jaguar also revealed images of its new Ingenium 2.0-litre petrol and diesel engine family at Geneva last week. The new generation of engines will be built in the UK, and debut in the XE. They should also power a range of other Jaguar models -- including the as-yet-unnamed 2016 SUV -- and Land Rovers.

Jaguar Land Rover’s new inline fours are designed for both transverse and longitudinal applications in rear- and all-wheel drive applications, and the company claims the new breed of engines will emit less than 100g/km of CO2 while offering top speeds in excess of 300km/h.

Expect the production XE to make its world debut at the Paris motor show in September, before being launched in Europe by early 2015 and released in Australia later next year.

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