#JaguarXJS

When the time came to design a successor to the beautiful Jaguar E-Type, British Leyland gave the world a much different V12-powered coupe. This was the XJ-S, and it stayed in production for more than 20 years. This week's Junkyard Find is an early High Efficiency model, found in a self-service yard near Reno, Nevada last fall.

They’re big, expensive, luxurious, and have 12 cylinders sitting under their long hoods. All of them will deplete your checkbook in multiple ways, but you can only take one home with you.

What’s it gonna be?

To celebrate the launch of a brand new model, the people at Jaguar massaged one of their longest-lived models into a special edition.

It’s the XJR you’ve never heard of.

Jaguar Land Rover unleashed a volley of trademarks over past month, offering a glimpse of some of the names it might use on upcoming models. However, JLR took something of shock-and-awe approach while filing, so it would be unlikely to see all of these affixed to the side of a new model.

One of the more standout monikers is XJS, Jaguar’s former luxury grand tourer. Absent for two decades, Jag could commit sacrilege and bring it back as something other than a large two-door without much blowback from the general public. Those who remember the original would no doubt be appalled. The company also trademarked Westminster, which likely denotes a particular blue paint Jaguar was fond of during nineties and not a specific model. JLR also slipped in a filing for Freestyle —sharing a title with a crossover utility vehicle that sold incredibly well before Ford changed its name.

One of my CCS Design professors had a saying: it’s all about Proportion, Proportion, Proportion. Just typing that makes me cringe. Perhaps it’s a popular phrase for car design wonks, or a riff from the restaurant business.

However, the theory is valid: Imagine if the Pontiac Aztek was proportioned a la Range Rover Evoque. It’s a fair notion. If that were the case, the Aztek may not have been bound for every “Top 100 Ugliest Cars” list since 2000.

Proving the theory is this 1988 Jaguar XJS. It’s a beautiful grand touring coupe because the proportions are right.

I saw it this morning. Slipping along the in the dim, pre-dawn light and shrouded in the thin early morning fog that wicked up in wispy tendrils from the damp pavement, it was an apparition, a beast from another age. Like poor Yorick, alas I knew it well and although, in time, it has become the subject of infinite jest, it was in its day the most excellent fancy of many young men and it bore my youthful dreams upon its back a thousand times. It had, I thought, no right to be among the living when so many other, better, vehicles of its era were consigned to their graves, rotting away in fields, pulled apart for their components or crushed, shredded and melted wholesale back into their base elements. Why then, knowing through the clarifying lens of history the terrible truth about the trouble that lurked beneath its slick sheet metal, did its unexpected appearance stir a long-forgotten longing in my heart?