Junkyard Find: 1999 Jaguar XJR

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin
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.
“It has never been and never will be for everyone.”
Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

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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  • Jacob_coulter Jacob_coulter on Oct 07, 2017

    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.

  • 6point3 6point3 on Nov 02, 2017

    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.

  • Justin You guys still looking for that sportbak? I just saw one on the Facebook marketplace in Arizona
  • 28-Cars-Later I cannot remember what happens now, but there are whiteblocks in this period which develop a "tick" like sound which indicates they are toast (maybe head gasket?). Ten or so years ago I looked at an '03 or '04 S60 (I forget why) and I brought my Volvo indy along to tell me if it was worth my time - it ticked and that's when I learned this. This XC90 is probably worth about $300 as it sits, not kidding, and it will cost you conservatively $2500 for an engine swap (all the ones I see on car-part.com have north of 130K miles starting at $1,100 and that's not including freight to a shop, shop labor, other internals to do such as timing belt while engine out etc).
  • 28-Cars-Later Ford reported it lost $132,000 for each of its 10,000 electric vehicles sold in the first quarter of 2024, according to CNN. The sales were down 20 percent from the first quarter of 2023 and would “drag down earnings for the company overall.”The losses include “hundreds of millions being spent on research and development of the next generation of EVs for Ford. Those investments are years away from paying off.” [if they ever are recouped] Ford is the only major carmaker breaking out EV numbers by themselves. But other marques likely suffer similar losses. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fords-120000-loss-vehicle-shows-california-ev-goals-are-impossible Given these facts, how did Tesla ever produce anything in volume let alone profit?
  • AZFelix Let's forego all of this dilly-dallying with autonomous cars and cut right to the chase and the only real solution.
  • Zelgadis Elantra NLine in Lava Orange. I will never buy a dirty dishwater car again. I need color in my life.
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