Jaguar SVO - Special Vehicle Operations
There are always creative people in a car company who want to try and do things that are off the radar, possibly off the wall but certainly off the product plan. And I think that’s always been the case at Jaguar. When I started there in 1978, the styling department worked out of a building called Experimental (which was where the X in the XK name originated from). In the early Fifties this changed into the Competition Shop which two decades later became the studio.
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Working with Bob Knight
Not only did former engineering director Bob Knight have the reputation for being very clever but also a chain smoker and someone who worked all hours, all of which I experienced first-hand. When I joined Jaguar in the late-Seventies not only was he the managing director of the company but on the basis of how Jaguar’s founder Sir William Lyons had always operated, he’d also taken charge of what he called styling despite having no experience.
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2000 Jaguar F-Type Concept
Over the years, I have come to realise just how important photography has been on my career. Car design is a very public art and it’s through photography that most people first saw the cars I created. Looking back, it was the photographs of my homemade Plaster of Paris car that helped me to get into the Royal College of Art in 1975.
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Jim Randle’s gas turbine hybrid
Now that hybrids have joined Jaguar’s line up – including the E-PACE featured on – I’m reminded that the concept of a Jaguar powered by an internal combustion engine working alongside an electric motor goes much further back. In the late Eighties, Jaguar created an advanced engineering group under engineering director Jim Randle’s leadership. Its remit was to look at advanced vehicle engineering in all its forms, but particularly powertrains.
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