
It’s easy to dismiss the Jaguar X-Type as a failure. With styling that harked back to the 1960s, and frequently derided by presenters of a long-running light-entertainment programme on BBC television as being “a Ford Mondeo”, perhaps it was just as well that there was no replacement model at the end of its life in 2010.
Unfulfilled potential, maybe. The result of Ford (which owned Jaguar at the time) imposing a platform on the company that then restricted the engineering and design potential.
The X-type was tasked with boosting Jaguar’s global presence, and sell 100,000 units a year. In fact, in its best year (2003) it achieved around 50,000.
But the X-Type has been the biggest selling Jaguar to date with around 350,000 cars sold worldwide.