Jaguar XJ Super V8
Why 6.5: A riveted and bonded aluminium monocoque — a body Jaguar claimed was 40 per cent lighter and 60 per cent stiffer than the steel one it replaced — carrying a supercharged 4.2 V8 in long-wheelbase form. The X350 weighs less than a contemporary 5 Series and nobody noticed, because Jaguar styled it to look exactly like the 1968 original.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
An Eaton blower sits in the vee and you hear it working — a rising mechanical whine layered over deep AJ-V8 rumble, in a body light enough that the exhaust still carries. But this is the long-wheelbase Jaguar built to out-hush a 7 Series, silenced for the chairman. The best blower noise here, one room away.
8-cylinder · supercharged · 6,300 rpm redline · rated 6.9 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €86k (2006) → €16k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
ISOFIX was spreading through these years rather than fitted across the board — whether a given car has rear anchors depends on its year and market.
Children were expected in the back. Front-passenger ISOFIX effectively didn't exist in this era, and airbag deactivation was patchy — treat the front seat as a no unless a specific car proves otherwise.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The X350 is the great forgotten piece of engineering in Jaguar's modern history. Ford money bought an all-aluminium structure assembled with aerospace rivets and epoxy rather than welded like Audi's cast-and-extruded A8, and it delivered a full-size flagship at around 1,600 kilos in base form. Then Jaguar wrapped it in a body so faithful to the 1968 XJ that customers assumed it was the same car with a facelift, and the model spent its entire life being ignored. The Super V8 sat at the top: long wheelbase, four hundred supercharged horsepower, individual rear seats, and a price near $94,000. Twenty years later the market has done what it does to complicated British flagships. Clean examples trade in the low teens, less than a set of tyres and a suspension refresh on the car when new, and the air springs, the electrics and a supercharger that wants regular attention are exactly why. This is the only car in this batch with a low mileage factor, and it is not because owners are precious — it is because a proportion of the surviving fleet is off the road at any given moment waiting on a part, and because these are third cars kept for good weather by people who bought them for what they cost rather than what they need. The flip side is that nobody is speculating. A Super V8 is bought to be enjoyed until something expensive happens.