Junkyard Find: 1999 Jaguar XJR
Published: October 2nd, 2017
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Say it’s 1999 and you’re shopping for a powerful and flashy European luxury sedan. Do you spend $51,300 for a new Mercedes-Benz E430? $65,000 for an Audi A8 4.2? A gleaming BMW 740i with a $66,970 price tag? Or do you pony up $68,450 for the Jaguar XJR, knowing it will depreciate faster than Confederate money after Appomattox… and not caring, because you’re such a baller that you know you’ll get another Jag in a couple of years?Today’s Junkyard Find, spotted in a Northern California self-service yard, shows us what happens to such a car when it ends up in the hands of its third or fourth owner.
The supercharger is long gone, and the engine’s valley became a luxurious rodent nest during the years of storage that took place after something costing five figures broke.
Someone went to the trouble to stuff up the spark plug holes, indicating that thoughts of repairing this 370-horse monster stayed at least somewhat alive. For a while.
Don’t think of this car the way it looks now. Think of it when it was new, probably in the hands of a freshy-minted Bay Area venture capitalist, no doubt flush with money from big deals involving the likes of Pets.com or Webvan. In other words, a 27-year-old who was driving a salvage-title Hyundai Accent by 2003.
Most of the XJR-specific trim is gone, but a shadow of the car’s former devil-may-car opulence remains. We haven’t seen many Jaguars in this series, for some reason— just this 2000 S-Type and this 1987 XJ-S.
Portuguese relays with Jaguar branding! That’s even better than relays by The Prince of Darkness.
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“It has never been and never will be for everyone.”
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Jaguar lost me after they stopped making this generation sedan. Every 4 door from them after this has just not looked right to me. This was a classic design that has aged well and the subtle changes always looked classy and timeless. Plus that interior is absolutely gorgeous.
iT'S A SAD STATE, but I have seen a lot of great cars going through these self serve (or destroy) junkyards..... an overabundance of cars sreated by the automakers. There really is no more real need for new cars except the one created in people's mind.