Jaguar C-XF review
“One thing should be abundantly clear whenever people are discussing Jaguar design,” asserts Director of Design Ian Callum. “Jaguars should be seen as modern cars and in the future people will appreciate them for that.” The C-XF is a confident statement of design purity and efficiency. It possesses a sense of latent power that conveys dynamism and movement even when the car is stationary.
“One thing should be abundantly clear whenever people are discussing Jaguar design,” asserts Director of Design Ian Callum. “Jaguars should be seen as modern cars and in the future people will appreciate them for that.” The C-XF is a confident statement of design purity and efficiency. It possesses a sense of latent power that conveys dynamism and movement even when the car is stationary. But the design language of C-XF is about more than just performance and power – it also blends many of Jaguar’s heritage styling cues with bold, contemporary features, signaling how Jaguars will evolve as new generations of sports saloons go into production. “Throughout its history Jaguar has created some of the most striking, modern and beautiful sports saloons imaginable and our objective with C-XF was to recognize those principle design disciplines,” explains Ian Callum.
“The values that I see in Jaguar aesthetics include purity, dynamism, latent power, balance and modernity.” Those Jaguar values are instantly recognisable in earlier iconic models. Founder Sir William Lyons demanded the same aesthetic correctness and every one of his legendary designs proved his skill in creating some of the most beautiful cars of all time. The C-XF’s design team took inspiration from some of Lyons’ greatest cars, including the 1950 Mark VII and 1959 Mark 2 saloons. Their beautiful flowing lines were influenced by some of the great sporting Jaguars of the era including the XK120 and both display that extraordinary feeling of latent power that so signifies a Jaguar. Ensuring that C-XF, while still a saloon, possessed the sporting profile expected of every Jaguar required maximum design efficiency – the whole exterior ‘skin’ had to be as tight as possible to the body architecture.
This focused the Jaguar design team on creating a car that Ian Callum describes as “the absolute definition of athleticism”, a performance-oriented sports saloon that is still inherently practical and capable of carrying four people in total comfort. C-XF has a taut beauty, but it is also a car that will challenge people’s preconceptions about Jaguar; it has an edginess that exudes a sense of underlying menace. “Jaguars should be perceived as cool cars,” says Ian Callum, “and cool cars attract interesting, edgy people. The next generations of Jaguars will do just that.”