Motoring News

Jaguar concept XJ front

Jaguar has revealed an exciting new concept designed to showcase the potential of its new XJ series. The XJ75 Platinum Concept revealed at the Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance over the weekend, although a showcar, may well be an example of things to come from the marque.

“The new Jaguar XJ Platinum Concept celebrates Jaguar’s 75th Anniversary, and highlights the uniqueness of the XJ, and more broadly, the increasingly personal nature of luxury cars in today’s market,” says Mike O’Driscoll, Managing Director of Jaguar Cars.

“The XJ is thoroughly modern, and captures the innovative and daring character that our founder Sir William Lyons built into every Jaguar. And the design team clearly had some fun making their first one-of-a-kind XJ design concept in that spirit.”

Although not an actual XJR, a new version of Jaguar’s sportiest saloon is expected to be released soon, so this look could be incorporated to a new production model about to roll off the line.

A 470hp Supercharged V8 powers the XJ75, and not the 500hp-plus engine that is used in a production XJR. However, it is equipped with new ground-hugging front, rear and side sills and also features bespoke 22-inch black wheels – all of which could easily foretell the shape of good things come. Inside the car, the black colour scheme is complemented by white air vents, veneers and diamond stitch suede inserts to the seats and headliner, that contrast with the black leather interior.

Jaguar concept XJ rear

Jaguar concept XJ wheels

Continuing on from the post i wrote about the mk1 Golf estate a couple of weeks ago, I thought I would start a series of posts about cool and amazing projects that I find across the Internet. There are a number of great build threads that I am following across a number of sites, but to start off with I have a project that I found today and just had to share.

The Thread is only 10 pages long and is still running with the car only half finished, but its still well worth a read as the engineering and build quality is second to none. The thread starts like this,

So i was going to swap the VR6 out of my mk3 track car into a mk2 jetta with a clean shell…or so i thought. Turns out that the jetta shell was far from clean, but it was free so i couldn’t complain . I gutted the car to find about an inch of water in the foot wells caused by a pin hole in the sunroof panel and plenty of sitting outside. I started removing the undercoating and got sick of being covered in sticky crap so i pulled out the big guns. I ended up removing the entire floor pan from the front firewall to the license plate tub. Now the fun begins…the plan has changed to create a mid-engined RWD 4 door jetta.

Followed by loads of photos of his little white mk2 Jetta getting cut down and completely stripped. It take the builder no time at all to start building up the space frame to house the driver and passenger and to house the new power unit and all the interior. The car gets a new heavy-duty roll cage and a test fitting of the VRT engine in the back.

Jetta getting the chop

Rear subframe in place, though it wont be used in the end.

The new VR6 engine in place.

I would continue with a full commentary of the whole build, but I am sure you would all prefer reading through and watching the car come to life with some excellent pieces of engineering along the way, including the billet hubs and completely custom suspension setup. Here are some highlights from the thread.

Centre bore mounthed split rims.

The Jetta finally on its wheels with all the spaceframe finished.

The rear suspension setup now looks nothing like the standard setup at all.

The front suspension it unique too, with two shocks dealing with two different plains of movement.

The car is truly amazing and will be a complete beast once finished. I will be watching the thread on Vortex with great interest. All of the photos in this blog have been taken from the Votex forum and have been originally taken by the builder of the car VR6-3.0.

A 37 year old Swedish man has been dished out the biggest speeding ticket in the world after being caught driving at 180mph (290km/h).

The man, who has not been named, was driving through Switzerland in his brand new Mercedes SLS AMG when he was stopped for travelling over 105mph over the speed limit. Under Swiss law, the level of fine is determined by the wealth of the driver and the speed recorded, meaning that the unnamed man has been fined a huge SFr1,080m ($1m or £656,000). As well as being given the speeding fine itself the mans car has been impounded and he is being forced to pay a daily fine of SFr3,600 for 300 days.

Local police spokesman Benoit Dumas said of the latest case that “nothing can justify a speed of 290km/h”. “It is not controllable. It must have taken 500m to stop,”.

I’m surprised the Swiss Police could catch him at 180mhp, they must have some very fast police vans. I wonder why he was in such a rush?

Mercedes SLS AMG

Mk1 VW Golf

The Volkswagen group has closed the deal on the purchase of the Italian design company Italdesign Giugiaro (IDG) by securing 90.1% of share in the company. The shares in the company were purchased by Lamborghini with the remaining 9.9% stake remaining in the hands of the Giugiaro family.

The two companies are not strangers with founder/chairman Giorgetto Giugiaro being responsible for the mk1 Scirocco and the very first Golf  all the back in the early 70′s. Giugiaro was also behind the Volkswagen Porsche Tapiro Concept in the 70′s as well, successfully showing his design prowess with the VW group.

It’s unclear if IDG will continue working with outside clients or will now dedicate itself to VW Group projects.

Volkswagen Porsche Tapiro Concept