Time to map out a plan for Villa's future
- Says blogger Matthew Turvey
Can C-X75 tempt Jaguar back to supercar market?
Friday 1st October 2010, 10:15AM BST.
Jaguar should take heed of the XJ220 before putting the C-X75 into production.
Jaguar’s showpiece electric supercar concept the C-X75 has been wowing crowds at the Paris Motor Show with its stunning looks – and rightly so writes Peter Carroll.
But the most radical element of the car is its advanced form of propulsion. There’s an electric motor at each wheel pushing out a total of 780bhp – enough for a top speed of 205mph and a 0-62mph time of 3.4 seconds.
If you made the most of this performance, however, you’d barely make it off your drive before running out of juice – so Jaguar has installed miniature gas turbines on board to generate power for the motors.
This is cutting edge engineering and the temptation must be to dive right in and put the car into production.
After all there will always enough people with a couple of hundred thousand quid in their back pockets looking for the latest in supercar chic.
But Big Cat bosses may do well to stand back, take a deep breath and recall what happened the last time the firm created a supercar at the tail end of the 1980s.
Commercial disaster - the XJ220
The XJ220 certainly had the performance to go with its low-slung looks and was the fastest production car in the world until the arrival of the McLaren F1 in 1994.
Autocar described it as the ‘finest handling supercar in the world’ – but the costs of making such a car spiralled out of control.
Jaguar had to scrap the planned V12 for a turbo V6; the promised four-wheel drive never materialised; and, most embarrassingly of all, spare supermini parts had to be used to complete XJ220.
Yet it still cost over £400,000 to put on the road – an astonishing sum for the time.
But times change and there is something irresistible about the C-X75. If the technology proves durable, Jaguar bosses may again be tempted to dip their toes into the supercar market.
And such is the appeal of the concept, I’d imagine there will be no shortage of takers.
- Read the Peter Carroll blog
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