Jaguar Cars
Among the 58 Jaguar Cars entries in the MotorJury library, the Jaguar XJ (XJ40) holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1986. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Jaguar XJ (XJ40) properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1980s were the decade of turbocharging, electronic fuel injection and the first mass digital engine management — Group B rallying and hot hatches defined its performance culture. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Jeep Jeep Wrangler, the Ferrari Ferrari F40, the SEAT SEAT Ibiza — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Jaguar XJ (XJ40) reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.9 L Jaguar AJ6 engine / AJ6 I6 / 3.2 L AJ6 I6 / 3.6 L AJ6 I6 / 4.0 L AJ6 I6 / 6.0 L Jaguar V12 engine / Jaguar V12; kerb weight is recorded at 3792-3902 lb; drive goes through 4-speed ZF 4HP22 transmission / ZF 4HP22 Automatic transmission / automatic / 4-speed ZF 4HP24 transmission / ZF 4HP24 automatic / 4-speed GM 4L80-E transmission / GM 4L80-E automa; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Jaguar Cars's own catalogue the Jaguar XJ (XJ40) sits alongside the Daimler Sovereign, the Jaguar 420 and Daimler Sovereign, the Jaguar Ascot, the Jaguar B99. The record names the Jaguar XJ (Series III) as its predecessor and the Jaguar XJ (X300) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to George Thomson and Roger Zrimec under Doug Thorpe (1978). Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Coventry, England.
For the years the United States federal record covers, EPA-rated economy comes in at 19 mpg combined, which works out near $4,200 a year in fuel at current prices.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Jaguar XJ (XJ40) was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.