Jaguar is a friend of mine (Jenny was!)

Bentleys were in my dreams.

There is an interesting recurring dream of mine involving British Green and sheer engineering perfection. The basic theme goes on like this: Me gifting my father the keys of a British engineering perfection on his birthday. The initial dreams involved Jaguars, but then somehow the name Bentley crept in. The reason for the Bentley’s replacing the Jags was after me seeing the two-door Bentley draped in British Racing green.The Bentley looked absolutely stunning. From then on Bentleys became a permanent fixture in my dreams and the most recent one was one with a British Racing Green Continental GT.

McPherson Strutting.

All of a sudden something amazing has happened to me in the past few months. I am smitten, I am in love, I am bowled over, I am trembling in boyish excitement, I have spent some time with the all new 2010 Jaguar XJ. The car is pure automotive perfection. The design is timeless. The pictures are only half the truth. In person XJ is a stunning piece of engineering. Take one look and you fall in love. The subtle yet modern design cues make this car so unique and so breathtakingly beautiful. I know right from my boyhood days that I am a Jagaurphile. The cars they made were so much in line with my intuition about cars. Somewhere along the line we grew apart. But after spending time with the XJ, it rekindled the old love and that too with great passion.

R-rated Brit Cat

There is something wrong with Jaguar. I can’t point out exactly what, but I can explain it by an example. See, you meet a girl when you were eighteen. She is all very pretty and perky. But thirty years later, when you meet the same girl, now an old woman, she has become the queen of gone horribly wrong aging. What will be actually going on in your mind at that point … “Ah, all those rumors of her about hard drinking and snorting the white powder were true after all!”

Scary Aging

The same is with jaguar. Jaguar used to be the epitome of British beauties. The everlasting prettiness of a Jaguar E-type sitting on your front porch for an example. But then she decided to go communist, gained some extra pounds and developed affection for quick money from retired dentists in Florida. Instead of becoming a cougar she became an ugly dying camel.

Dental Wagon - Ugly Duckling of British Motoring.

Now, Ian Callum and his professed love towards Jaguar, is trying to save her family reputation. I cannot discount Callum as just another car designer. He is a visionary, a genius, an artist. But somehow, all his hard work does not feel right. In my dream world if Callum had designed the new S class, it would have been a huge success. In the real world though, he is designing the new luxury barge from Jaguar called the XJ. It is all good looking and futuristic and a break away from the bad aging. Even then, it doesn’t help Jaguar a little bit.