10,000 man hours of work and at a cost of over £1,000,000 Jaguar will be recreating nine replicas of the 1957 Jaguar XKSS sports car using the original designs. I’m sure that the proud new owners of these £1m price tag cars would want get the admiring glances from other road users whilst taking their new toy for a spin but sadly this isn’t the case, the nine new owners will be limited as to how they will be able to show off. Due to the recreations being a complete replica of the 1957 original model and specifications bar some minor changes including making 4ml amendments to the doors (so they close correctly) they do not meet the current safety and emissions standards meaning that the cars are limited to private land or race tracks.
The XKSS originally made as a road version of the Jaguar D-Type that was used and won in the Le mans race, was constructed between the years of 1954 to 1956. In 1957 there was news of the fire in the Coventry based factory that lost the 9 remaining XKSS cars waiting to be shipped to the United States. meaning that only 16 of the planned 25 made it to their buyers. This week one of the XKSS replicas have been placed in the Petersen Museum at Los Angeles. This car is now known as “Car Zero” and will not be sold but will be used as a blueprint for the nine to be sold as well as for testing and demonstrating.
When we think of car manufacturing nowadays we think of automated machines that do everything but the 9 continuation cars are even being made using the traditional shape forming process named hand-wheeling. Kev Riches the Jaguar classic engineering manager has said that the XKSS is one of the most important cars in jaguar history and that they will be faithful to the original from using the same type, number and position of rivets (over 2,000) to the Smiths gauges on the dash.
