The Jag XJ is back

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 signifying feline grace. The Growler is a full-frontal cat face, its teeth bared, representing 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, 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 before the unveiling. The big sedan carries out design themes that 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 JD Power & Associates and others.

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

For years 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, Callum said, "Sir William Lyons wasn't fearful of his heritage. It was his heritage, and he could do what he liked 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.

A note: Jaguar says the aluminum body of the new sedan weighs no more than the steel body of a Mini, suggesting that the planned six- and eight-cylinder engines should be able to move the XF with catlike quickness.

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. "We had to get away from oval grilles harking too literally to the past," Callum said.

Not that the new car is without references to earlier models. The grille is inset like an air intake, evoking a racecar, 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," Callum said. He admitted to a visual trick: darkening the rearmost roof pillar to reduce its visual weight.

As for the Leaper, it has moved to the rear. The famous hood ornament is partly a casualty of globalisation, Callum said, since such protrusions are banned for pedestrian safety 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.

New York Times