Tag Archives: Jaguar

Restomod

Eagle E-Type Lightweight GTR: The Jaguar That Remembers What It Means to Be a Jaguar

Enzo Ferrari once called the Jaguar E-Type “the most beautiful car ever made.” He wasn’t wrong. Sixty-odd years later, the car still looks like it was sketched by a deity with a taste for long bonnets and dangerous curves. But while Jaguar itself seems to have traded its soul for silence — with a future full of EVs and corporate PowerPoints — one British outfit is determined to remind us what the big cat once was.

That outfit is Eagle, and for over four decades they’ve been fettling, perfecting, and flat-out worshipping the E-Type. Their latest creation, the Eagle E-Type Lightweight GTR, isn’t just another restomod. It’s a rolling love letter to speed, purity, and the kind of mechanical theatre modern cars have forgotten how to perform.

Featherweight Fury

The name tells you most of the story. “Lightweight” doesn’t just mean a few panels swapped for aluminium. Eagle’s engineers went full monk on the diet plan: aluminum, magnesium, titanium, and carbon fiber everywhere. The result? A kerb weight of just 930 kilograms — yes, about the same as a first-gen Mazda MX-5, but with an entirely different appetite for violence.

Beneath that long, impossibly beautiful bonnet lives a 4.7-litre straight-six, hand-built and gloriously mechanical. It sends 450 horsepower and 500 Nm of torque through a Getrag five-speed manual to the rear wheels. There are no flappy paddles, no digital trickery — just clutch, lever, and the guttural snarl of unfiltered combustion. 0–100 km/h arrives in four seconds flat, and if you keep your foot down, the GTR will howl all the way to 305 km/h.

Handling the Heritage

To keep all that feral energy in check, Eagle’s fitted Ohlins adjustable dampers, independent suspension, and AP Racing brakes that could probably stop a small planet. The result is a car that’s razor-sharp but never synthetic. It moves, it breathes, it talks to you through the wheel — not through a touchscreen or a mood light.

Inside, there’s a nod to civility. Alcantara-trimmed seats, air conditioning, a subtle audio system, and decent sound insulation make sure your spine doesn’t file for divorce after a few hundred miles. It’s the perfect balance between Le Mans weekend and Cotswolds getaway.

A Million Reasons to Smile (and Cry)

Now, the price. Eagle will happily build you one for just over a million euros. Which sounds obscene, until you remember that this isn’t a car so much as an act of resurrection. It’s what happens when passion, craftsmanship, and mechanical purity are valued over efficiency charts and app connectivity.

Meanwhile, at Jaguar HQ…

And here’s the sting. While Eagle handcrafts reminders of Jaguar’s golden age, the actual Jaguar brand seems adrift — steering toward an electric future that feels more spreadsheet than soul. The Lightweight GTR stands as both a tribute and a quiet protest. It whispers (loudly) what the world’s carmakers seem to have forgotten: that weight is the enemy, noise is good, and beauty should always come before battery percentage.

In the end, Eagle hasn’t just built the ultimate E-Type. They’ve built a time machine — one that doesn’t take you back, but shows you what the present could have been, had we never lost our nerve.

Source: Eagle

News

Cancelled Jaguar XJ EV Was Secretly Engineered for a Straight-Six Engine

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

News

Waymo’s Driverless Jaguars to Hit London Streets in 2026

Next year, a fleet of self-driving Jaguar I-Pace SUVs will start rolling silently through the streets of London, not as posh Chelsea runabouts but as fully autonomous taxis, courtesy of American tech firm Waymo. Backed by the UK government and cheered on by the motoring industry, this pilot marks the country’s boldest leap yet into the driverless future.

Waymo’s no rookie either. The company already has its robo-taxis roaming across six U.S. states, with cars that have collectively clocked up more than 100 million miles. It’s also gone international, recently launching in Japan. Now, with a few British tweaks — likely including a penchant for roundabouts and an innate fear of cyclists — Waymo’s machines are headed for the capital.

The Robot Invasion Begins

London will be the first testing ground, where Waymo’s electric Jaguars will quietly map, learn, and ferry passengers through some of the most chaotic streets this side of Mumbai. It’s part of a new government-backed framework that allows companies to run autonomous services before personal driverless cars become legal — currently pencilled in for 2027.

In other words, while you still can’t legally let your Tesla drive you to Tesco, you can soon hail a taxi that does exactly that.

And Waymo won’t be alone. Uber, clearly not wanting to be outgunned by Silicon Valley rivals, has confirmed its own driverless trials will begin next spring — in collaboration with British AI mapping firm Wayve. Because nothing says “trust us” quite like the combined forces of a taxi giant and a startup run by machine learning PhDs.

The Government’s Grand Vision

UK Transport Minister Heidi Alexander is understandably chuffed. She calls the move “cutting-edge investment” that will make Britain a “world leader in new technology.” Lofty words, but not without merit — the UK’s regulatory framework for autonomous driving is among the most advanced globally, and this pilot could finally bring some Silicon Roundabout sparkle to Britain’s roads.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) has even dubbed the project a “landmark moment.” Its chief, Mike Hawes, hailed it as proof that Britain’s ambition is translating into a “social and mobility revolution.”

Translation: if all goes to plan, you might one day flag down a taxi that never misses a turn, never gets distracted, and — crucially — never asks if you’ve “got any cash, mate.”

Why It Might Actually Work

Waymo insists this isn’t just a publicity stunt. The company already has engineering hubs in London and Oxford, and it claims the project will support the capital’s transport goals — namely, reducing collisions and improving accessibility.

“We’re making roads safer and transportation more accessible where we operate,” says Tekedra Mawakana, Waymo’s co-CEO. The firm argues that removing the human from the driving equation could drastically improve safety — a point backed by Road Safety GB director James Gibson, who puts it bluntly: “Autonomous vehicles hold the potential to significantly improve road safety because, quite simply, the human driver is removed.”

Ouch. Sorry, Clarkson.

But Let’s Be Honest…

Of course, we’ve heard the promises before. Nissan’s been running autonomous Leafs around UK roads for years, claiming to have brought driverless tech “one step closer to reality.” And yet, the reality is still full of messy edge cases — rogue delivery vans, double-parked Range Rovers, and pedestrians who think zebra crossings are optional.

Still, there’s something undeniably exciting about the idea. For all our British cynicism, seeing a Waymo silently glide down Oxford Street — steering itself, watching every cyclist, never missing a green light — might just be one of those moments where you realize: the future’s arrived, and it doesn’t need a steering wheel.

So, next year, when a driverless Jaguar pulls up outside your flat and flashes its lights, don’t panic. Just get in, sit back, and let the car do what it was built for — everything.

Source: Autocar