Originally published at: This is an incredibly sexy Jaguar XK-E | Boing Boing
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When I was a kid, my (older) brother got into Hot Wheels in a big way, so I dabbled. I got myself a purple Jaguar XK-E (I forget if it was Hot Wheels or Matchbox) cuz I thought it was pretty. Thing is, it also beat every single one of my brother’s cars in races, lol.
So XK-Es have ever after held a special place in my heart <3
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Silver is much better, although I understand the love of ‘British racing green.’
It’s a lovely color. We had a Renault 18i when I was much younger. Crap car, but it was pretty, with a burnt orange interior.
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Gorgeous. A friend bought two of these in high school after saving money from summer work. Both were non-working. He spent a summer combining the two into one and had the coolest car in high school his senior year.
Andrew
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It really is the most beautiful car. They should have just stopped designing new cars after it was made.
I want one off the new electric ones Jaguar’s putting out now.
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My best friend in elementary and into junior high had a '63 XK-E in his garage that his dad was working on restoring. When Mr VV finally got it running right he took me barreling down the local back road where people always drove too fast. I have loved the Jaguar XK-E since and hold it high on my list of cars I would love to own but know better.
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It’s one of the most beautiful cars ever made. Enzo Ferrari thought so too.
I remember reading about conversions being made for more horsepower around 40 years ago. They put a Buick small block aluminum V8, a Chevy 4-speed transmission and a shortened American car rear axle/differential in. Apparently it changed the weight distribution to an almost perfect front/rear balance and cut 90 lbs. off the total weight while adding a ton of torque, horsepower and reliability.
I think the engine was the same one that GM sold the dies and castings for, to Rover.
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Though the XK engine - in all 3.8 - 4.2 XKE guises… and lets toss in the V12 versions as well - was no slouch, it wasn’t lightweight. My favorite review of the engine (sitting in an earlier XK120) and it’s gobs of torque was from Chuck Goolsbee who described it thusly:
It was named the XK120 as a reference to the engine, and the car’s theoretical top speed. While almost all of us look at speedometers that reach that number today, back in the late 1940s this figure was stratospheric. This made the XK120 the fastest production car in the world at that time. A stock example could reach 125, and Jaguar famously tested a slightly modified XK120 on a Belgian freeway clocking an official 136.5 MPH. To illustrate the The DOHC, hemi-head inline-six’s amazing torque, it puttered past the automotive press at 10 MPH in top gear just after the record run. This car was the Bugatti Veyron of its day: the very pinnacle of automotive engineering.
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XK120 is best described as a high-performance tractor. You have an engine with seemingly limitless grunt. You’re wrestling it around with a steering wheel the size of a XXL pizza. You spar endlessly with the Moss gearbox, noted for a straight-cut non-synchro 1st and barely-synchro everything else. You have drum brakes that may or may not stop you, depending on random chance or planetary
alignments. Leaf springs and recirculating-ball steering wrap up the whole rustic package of chassis vagueness.
For more enjoyable reading - see here: Review: 1954 Jaguar XK120 Roadster | The Truth About Cars
And then if you have all the money and nothing better to do with it, go order one of these:
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Beautiful driveway sculpture. Of course with Lucas electrics…
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I just learned that USians really do know it as the XK-E.
The rest of us know it as the E-type, of course.
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Just don’t let the smoke out of the Lucas wiring and they’ll work fine. And if you do, you’re covered with this:
That or go and clean the electrical grounds (earths) and things generally work as intended as well.
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Not to be confused with the XKSS, the street legal version of the D-type. Now THAT is a rare car, but it betrays it’s racing origin by being less practical. eg, you had to lower the top to access the fuel filler.
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Silver is much better, although I understand the love of ‘British racing green.’
It’s the only color besides black that should be on a car.
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I never got the appeal. There are some nice lines, but the pretty straight front window always irked me, breaking the otherwise nice line (obviously even worse when the roof is closed)
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Depends on the car.
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I remember the first time I saw an XK-E; the small mountain town in B.C. I grew up in didn’t have many “exotic” cars go through. I was surprised by how small it was; advertising of the period led me to believe it would be much bigger (still remember seeing the 1962 (?) ad in R&T, with the two E-Types drawn in red and the dubious 150 mph top speed claim. I had at the time a Dinky toy type model of a D-Type with most of the BRG chipped off it; I took the only model paint I had, metallic gold, and painted the model that colour. Immediately regretted it, wiped that paint off but a few gold flecks remained in the grills on top of the hood. I not much later lost that toy. Ten years pass, I’m 500 miles away in Vancouver looking at an E-Type displayed in the public library, along with some other sports cars and accessories. There as part of the display was my tiny Dinky Toy D-Type, recognizable from it’s chipped paint and tiny flecks of metallic gold. Small world.
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And then there’s these guys…
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Or just hit up the mother ship here?
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