What's your favourite XJ?

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Wow! It’s been five decades since Jaguar launched the XJ6. Oh, hang on. Initially it was named XJ4 and dubbed ‘E-type saloon’ in the press and it didn’t have the double-overhead-cam 4.2-liter inline-six. What it did have under that long bonnet? We don’t know. Perhaps you do? When you look at the historic prototype images below, which date back to 1966, you may even well recognize the E-type in it. Cool, isn’t it? You may also recognize William Lyons’ famous Wappenbury Hall house in the background.

The current Jaguar cars’ head of design said he remembered the XJ6 well as a 14-year-old, as designer Ian Callum told The Autocar: “At the time the XJ6 came out, it wasn’t considered a proper Jag, and yet it became the quintessential design for years. When it came out, people my father’s age said, ‘That’s not a Jaguar.’ And as a teenager, I thought, ‘Well, that’s a Jag, and I love it, so you can all go to hell.’”

Now that’s exactly what we thought of the XJ he came up with in 2010 – certainly a dramatic departure from the XJ6-range as we knew it. We surely must be getting old..!

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