Jaguar’s cancelled electric flagship, the ill-fated XJ that never saw the light of day, might not have been as purely electric as we once thought. According to its designer, Ian Callum, the luxury saloon was “packaged to take a six-cylinder engine, if need be.”
That’s right — the EV that was supposed to signal Jaguar’s all-electric rebirth was secretly engineered with an escape hatch back to combustion. Speaking on Autocar’s My Week in Cars podcast, Callum revealed the XJ’s flexible packaging could have accommodated one of Jaguar Land Rover’s straight-six engines — the same ones that power the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport today.
It’s a revelation that casts the cancelled project in a new light. When Jaguar pulled the plug in 2021, the global EV market was expected to surge. But as we now know, that wave never quite crested the way automakers hoped. Mercedes, for one, is already preparing to sunset its EQE and EQS sedans earlier than planned in favor of a next-generation S-Class that will offer both gasoline and electric powertrains.
Had Jaguar kept the XJ’s internal-combustion option in play, it might have given the brand the flexibility to pivot with market demand — a crucial capability as the industry now scrambles to rebalance its EV ambitions.
Callum didn’t confirm what would have lived under the hood, but the likely candidate was JLR’s Ingenium straight-six, mounted on the MLA platform that the XJ was designed to share with its SUV cousins. The sedan, interestingly, was set to abandon the traditional short- and long-wheelbase format entirely. “We didn’t want to get into this ramble about two wheelbases,” Callum explained. “So we created something in the middle in terms of size.”
Design-wise, the final XJ leaned more toward stately than sporty — a direction Callum says he “fought against.” Still, it would have been a striking return for a nameplate that has defined Jaguar luxury for half a century.
And it wasn’t the only future model on Callum’s sketchpad before his 2019 departure. Alongside the XJ, he penned designs for a next-gen F-Pace (which doubled as a new I-Pace) and even a fresh Jaguar sports car likely intended as the F-Type’s successor. None survived the brand’s sweeping 2021 Reimagine strategy, which effectively hit reset on Jaguar as a maker of low, long, and loud cars.
Now running his own design consultancy, Callum Design, with former JLR colleague David Fairbairn, the famed designer is free to speak a little more candidly. On the podcast, he mused about the strange design tropes of modern EVs: “I look at all these new electric cars and they look like they were designed 20 years ago. I don’t understand why they got long bonnets on them. Why would you build an electric car with a long bonnet on it? It’s not got a V12 in there.”
He’s not wrong. As the industry stumbles through its identity crisis — caught between the past’s grandeur and the future’s silence — the unreleased XJ stands as a fascinating “what if.” What if Jaguar had built a car that bridged both worlds? What if the XJ’s silent heart had been allowed to beat?
We’ll never know. But one thing’s clear: even in cancellation, Jaguar’s most ambitious saloon still has plenty to say.
Source: Autocar