Jay probably just grabbed the wrong adjective out of the air. He has a long history of espousing a genuine love for Jaguars. He owns plenty of them, which he has featured on his show along with many others he doesn't own. His first "collector" sports car was an XK120, which he still owns and loves. He has an amazing all-original '63 XK-E, and a modified short wheelbase V12 E-Type that Jaguar should have built. One of my favorite episodes of Jay Leno's Garage is the one in which he drives Steve McQueen's XKSS and just raves about it.

Anyone who doubts Jay's automotive bona fides hasn't seen enough of his collection. It's one of the finest and most diverse in the world, with historically-important and rare examples from the earliest days of the automobile, to perfectly-restored classics, to artfully-exectuted resto-mods, to outrageous custom one-offs, to contemporary production models (including a current XJ), and his knowledge of the technology embodied in each car is exhaustive.

Cheers,

Don

 

To me Jay is a big kid who never grew up.... Some refer to his type as a "man child" but for me this term is way to hash for him. I do think his taste in everything automobile is a bit immature... he tends to like and the iconic or flashy cars found on the cover of magazines, attention grabbers from auto-shows and cars that have some momentary importance. Cars like the Blastoline, the Showgun, The Ecojet, the Rocket Trike are good examples of this. He also owns lots of stuff children are into like Fire Engines, steam engines, and a batman car. It makes perfect sense for him... he is a comedian that tells clean adolescent jokes and a show business guy who's "flash in the pan" lasted quite some time so no surprise he likes "flash in the pan" cars.

No doubt... his opinion moves markets. When he collects or features a car is immediately goes up in value. Usually the price pulls back after awhile.

As for his Bulbous comment about the XJS, I too think he used the wrong adjective but his comment was disparaging none-the-less. The XJS does suffer some dis-proportionality brought on by style trends of the time and federal bumper mandates. He likes the XJC and that's no surprise. It's one of the best looking cars ever pressed and looks good from any angle. It looks good inside the trunk, it looks great with the hood open, and it even look good from the underside. It was also Sir William Lyons's last design and its a masterpiece that can never be again becasue of regulations and changing times. My beef with Jay Leno is his disparaging comment on lumpers which I find quite hypocritical since he owns many car with highly modified engines or without their original engines but I'm not suprised by this because it would be consistent with his immaturity.

 

i think in the context of that particular car he was showing he wasn't too far off. but the styling of the xjc is a bit more classic jag than the xjs. i think poor word choice for sure.

i am also certainly not against lumps obviously. but if someone were to take a beautiful example of a xjc or xjs and do a hack job of installing a bone stock smog era 160hp small block in it would certainly be a shame. it has been done many times.

when i decided i was going to lump mine there was no way i was going to put a stock engine in it, i did't think it would do the car justice to lump it unless i was going to nearly double its original horsepower and i am probably pushing more in the neighborhood of 600 now.

basically it comes down to the particular car and what that particular example is meant to be, taken out of context of the car in the video a few of the comments seem pretty harsh and hypocritical but in the context of that particular car that they were featuring i don't think the comments were so far off the mark to be worth getting upset over.

 

It took me a long time to like the XJS. My dad, a Jaguar fanatic, never liked them. His first Jaguar was a '63 XKE Coupe. I suppose once you start there, it's all downhill after that. He owned a Series II XJ12 and looked into buying several other SII and SIII sedans for my mom but never did because we lived too far away (2 hours) from a Jaguar service center.

My first XJS, a gold '88, I got because I was able to trade another car I had (Bricklin SV-1) for it straight-up. The guy who got the Bricklin got the better end of the deal by far in terms of appreciated value over the years, but me getting the XJS allowed me to get to know it and appreciate it. It was also the last car my dad rode in before he died. By the time I got rid of it (couldn't get it to pass smog and at the time, I had no money to chase the problem), I had grown to really like it, and even to like its styling. The rear buttresses are what Dad never liked and they're my least-favorite part of the car when viewed from the side. From the rear, though, they're quite cool. I never had a problem with the rubber bumpers, because stateside that's all I ever knew the car to look like. When I see a chrome-bumper XJS now (or even an XJ6 like Leno's) my brain has to readjust to the fact that what I'm seeing isn't wrong.

I think what Jay might be referring to is the XJS is one of the few sports cars of its era that is (or at least feels) almost as wide as a modern vehicle. The general styling, which looks wide at the front and tapered at the back, only exacerbates the feeling that this is a wide-hood, wide-cabin GT cruiser rather than the little, nimble and slender sports car the XKE was. Also, all cars have an optical illusion of sorts for the driver based on what the front of the car looks like as you look out from the driver's seat over the hood. An SI-SIII XJ sedan, for instance, has rounded swells over the headlights and a peaked hood. The XJS has what looks almost like the squared rear of a jet engine nacelle tapering inward over its headlights. The hood is long, too. I understand his comment, even though I don't agree with it.

The XKE was an instant classic. The XJ6 is the most attractive sedan ever designed. The XJS is sort of a mashup of a lot of different ideas. It takes time to appreciate, which is probably why our collection values are so much lower than much of our competition from the same era.

Jess

 

Most comments about the XJS are based on what it is like compared to the E-type. Makes sense in that it followed the E but what most do not understand is it was not intended to be a sports car but rather a GT. So a comment like the XJS was a " little bulbous " makes sense when compared to the E.

Another thing I have noticed is how often when people think about the E-type they think of the two seat series but tend to forget that Jaguar was trying to capture the GT market with the E-type 2 + 2 and IMO that version of the E-type looked bulbous.

What helped me understand how well Jaguar captured the GT 2 door concept in the mid 70's was when I compared the car to it's main intended rival at the time which was the Mercedes 4 seat 2 door SLC. I never thought the SLC was a very attractive vehicle and IMO compared to the XJS, the SLC large fixed roof for a 2 door looked bulbous.

 

JAY FOR EVER YOUNG! tis how he is made, that seperates him from the pack!
ron