After 51 years of continuous production, the very last Jaguar XJ powered by an internal combustion engine rolled off the line last July. When the new Jag flagship hits the road next year, it’ll be an all-electric flagship.
You might be picturing Jaguar’s controversial I-Pace electric SUV, but with a trunk. Don’t. The XJ will remain a luxuriant, elegant sedan. This time, though, that elongated roof won’t just be for the fashionable four-door coupe look. It’ll contain a functional hatchback like an Audi A7.
The XJ won’t share a platform with the I-Pace, either. Instead, it’ll be built on Jaguar’s new Modular Longitudinal Architecture, a rear-drive platform designed to accommodate everything from combustion engines with mild hybrid enhancements to plug-in hybrids and pure EVs like the XJ.
Like other EVs, Jag will offer a variety of battery pack sizes and motor configurations in the XJ. We don’t know all of them yet, but top-spec models are expected to feature a 100-kW-hr battery pack powering four electric motors, one per wheel. All told, the system should generate 800 hp and hopefully greater range than the I-Pace.
Jaguar is finishing final development now, so we expect to see the new flagship previewed later this year and available sometime in 2021. As neither batteries nor flagships come cheap, we expect it to cost significantly more than the old gas-powered XJ, with a starting price in the range of $90,000.
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Source: Future - motortrend.com
