As a luxury player without a sport-utility vehicle, it certainly seems like Jaguar has been behind the ball for quite some time now. Granted, with its sister brand, Land Rover, it didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to build one.
But after seeing Porsche dive in head first, followed by Maserati and now Bentley, it seems like it's a situation where "If you can't beat them, join them." When you consider how many Porsche Cayennes and BMW X5s are sold, it almost seems like a no brainer. Build an SUV.
Well, that's what Jaguar's going to do. We've seen it previewed in concept form as the C-X17 and given how positive the reception was, we expect the leaping cat to produce something awfully similar to it. Hopefully Jaguar learned a thing or two from the F-Type. Build it — and design it beautifully — and they will come.
That said, an awfull awkward development mule has been spotted roaming near the company's HQ in the U.K. Sporting a modified XF body, it's clearly an SUV chassis with those large wheels/tires and jacked up body. Given the proportions of the vehicle, we're thinking it looks similar to the C-X17's size.
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The SUV will be Jaguar’s first, and was previewed by the C-X17 concept car from the Frankfurt motor show.
Under the adapted XF bodywork on this early engineering mule is Jaguar’s new architecture, whose title iQ[Al] stands for ‘intelligent aluminium architecture’. It underpinned the C-X17 and will first be used on a BMW 3-series-rivalling saloon due in 2015.
Jaguar bosses say the architecture is both modular and scalable and enables flexible, high-volume production that can produce competitive interior packaging and allows a great deal of design freedom.
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