One of the crucial attributes for a car designer to possess is the ability to separate what they personally like, from what customers like. It’s important for me when either designing a car, talking about the design of cars, or reviewing cars, to put aside my own preferences and tastes and understand what’s important to people actually buying the thing in question. My fallback analogy is this: I hate the sodding Beatles. Their stupid haircuts. Their stupid suits. Their stupid jangled caterwauling. All of it makes me want to scoop out my eyeballs with a melon baller and shove an ice pick through my ears. I just don’t like them but the point is I do recognize their importance and why other people like them, even if it’ll be a cold day in hell before any of their music darkens my playlists. Another bit of swinging sixties Britishness that is universally adored but I’m caustically ambivalent about is the Jaguar E-Type. Put the kettle on (coffee, white, no sugar and don’t bring me any of that freeze-dried instant crap), it’s time for Damn Good Design.
Enzo Ferrari supposedly called it “the most beautiful car ever made” (it’s unclear whether he actually said such a thing). It’s one of six cars on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (David, Torch and Mercedes will no doubt be thrilled to learn three of the others are a Willys Jeep, a Beetle and a Smart). No click bait list of best looking cars is complete without an E-Type somewhere near the summit. Good grief it’s all so predictable. Saying you like E Types like saying you like The Beatles. Can’t you make even a modicum of effort into being just a little bit original?
Jaguar as we know and understand it really got going properly as a car company after the Second World War, that particular dust-up forcing a change of name from the Swallow Sidecar Company. Their first post-war sports car was the sensational XK120 of 1948 – named after its top speed of 120mph. It was a raffish unadorned streamliner that riffed on the profile of the pre-war BMW 328. Solid steel wheels and enclosed rear wheel arches gave the original roadster a touch of the art-deco. It represented a yearning for speed and glamour from a bombed-out country still reeling from war. Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart were among the first customers for what was then the fastest production car in the world. As the forties became the fifties the XK120 begat the XK140 and finally XK150, moving further away from the original’s simplicity to a more traditional wood trim and wire wheels look.
I Want That Car And I Want It Now
In 1951 and 1953 Jaguar had been victorious at Le Mans with the C-Type, a racing version of the XK120. They followed that up with a purpose-built racer, the D-Type, which won the race in 1955, 1956 and 1957. Both these cars had their shape honed by the aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer, who had previously worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company during the war. The quintessential British boffin, his aerodynamic curves created from mathematical formulae helped the big cats on the mighty Mulsanne straight, but away from the unique challenges of Le Sarthe, Jaguar’s fortunes in the World Sportscar Championship were mixed. This led to several unsold customer D-Type racers being converted into a road-going version, the XKSS, but Sir William Lyons had long wanted a new high-speed sports car to replace the XK150.
What emerged in 1961 at the Parc des Vives hotel in Geneva was no less a sensation than the XK120 had been thirteen years earlier. A heady mix of wartime and racing engineering experience clothed in Sayer’s aero forms further developed from the D-Type, the E-Type was all thrusting symbolism and mechanical theatre, dripping with tumescent sex appeal. The voluptuous curves of the D-Type had been stretched, smoothed and rounded into something a lot less feral and a lot more suggestive.
It sent the press and public alike into fits of rapture – priced at a bargain £2097 for the roadster and £2196 for the fixed head, nothing could touch its combination of speed, style and price. It had a 3.8-liter XK straight six engine lifted from the D-Type making 265bhp, a four speed box and crucially, independent rear suspension and disc brakes. Jaguar claimed a top speed of 150 mph when the typical asthmatic family sedan of the time would struggle to gasp its way much past seventy. Jaguar’s top speed claims might have been exaggerated but it didn’t matter. You were not going faster at any price.
Aston Martins and Ferraris at double or triple the E-Type’s money were not even close. When it appeared in New York a month after Geneva, Frank Sinatra apparently said “I want that car, and I want it now.” Bogie’s opinion on the new Jaguar remains sadly unrecorded, as by then he was worm food. Still, it’s impossible to overstate the effect the E-Type had on its release. Sir William Lyons certainly wasn’t ready for its impact; because of their slightly antiquated production methods, Jaguar couldn’t build the cars fast enough.
Iconic upon launch, the E-Type has remained an object of lust and desire in the sixty years since. Good going for a car built in an unglamorous ex-wartime factory by men in brown coats with horn-rimmed glasses. Even if it hadn’t been the fastest thing on the road in its day people would still have revered it for the way it looks. And this is where my problems with the E-Type begin.
Breaking The Rules
When you enroll at car design school you are not handed a big book of Car Design Rules that Are Not To Be Broken. The closest thing to a default text is probably H-Point, which doesn’t get into the aesthetic side of things at all but covers pretty much everything else. However, there are rules, or rather guidelines that will help nudge you in the direction of a pleasing aesthetic outcome as you scratch your way through hours upon hours of sketching sessions. It takes time, trial and error, and an innate artistic sensibility to gain an understanding of what works and doesn’t, and why. Although Malcolm Sayer was in the strictest sense an engineer, he did have an artistic side. And the E-Type does break a couple of what we would now consider cardinal car design rules, but by gets away with it through sheer chutzpah.
A healthy dash-to-axle ratio is something that idiots think defines how good a car looks. It concerns how far away the centerline of the front wheels is from the base of the windshield when looking at a car from the side. Taking this dimension in isolation, the E-Type has way too much of it; a consequence of packaging a locomotive of an inline six in what is a very small car – only 145” (4.6m) long, 65” (1.6m) wide and 48” (1.2m) high. But taken as an overall proportion, the bonnet length is balanced out by the passenger cabin taking up almost the entirety of the back half of the car, and the fact it sits very lightly on its inset wheels.
Another issue in side profile that goes against the rules is the pillars. Ideally, side pillars should all align to an imaginary convergence point (or points) somewhere above the roof of the car. On the E-Type the A and B pillars are parallel. By itself this is not a massive problem – the B pillar had to be at that angle because otherwise the side glass wouldn’t be able to drop into the door. But A-pillar being so upright creates an unholy mess at the base where it joins the sheet metal, because the door shut line then has to travel forward to create a big enough door opening to swing your legs in. Thus with the door open there’s a bloody great corner in the door opening, perfect for cracking your kneecaps on. This was probably driven by Sayer wanting as much curvature in the windscreen as possible for aerodynamic reasons, but it’s a compromise too far. Better to move the base of the A pillar forwards and flatten out the windscreen a bit, giving you a bigger door opening and then you could make do with two normal size wipers, rather than three tiddly ones.
You get the feeling looking at an E-Type that the metal skin is struggling to contain everything inside it. The way the bonnet bulges. The mechanicals hanging out underneath the car, in particular the no-effort-made exhaust pipes. The passenger compartment barely wrapping around two occupants and their luggage. This is not someone wearing something tight but considered in order to look alluring – it’s the twat wearing Aviators who skips leg day in a top two sizes too small. It’s almost bursting out all over the place. And don’t get me started on the humpbacked 2+2 or the later bloated series III V12 models, which were just embarrassing. For a car verging on caricature, they push it too far into bad comedy.
Sayer designed aircraft before he designed cars; little wonder the E Type looks like a tear in the wrong place and it’ll explode like a Comet airliner. That may sound a bit melodramatic but remember that bargainacious purchase price? These things were thrown together from cheap materials, and Jaguar didn’t exactly have a reputation for reliability. In one darkly humorous episode of Mad Men, one of the major characters attempts to gas himself to death, using the exhaust from his E-Type. But he fails because the car won’t start. But was their ever more perfect car casting than Jaguar in a sixties set show about ostensibly high-flying, good-looking men drinking and womanizing their way through the working week?
It’s The First Footballers Car
And this is the second part of my problem with the E-Type. It was released right at the start of the swinging sixties. Away from Hollywood stars, it was the epitome of ‘a lot of flash for not much cash’ – the very first footballers car. George Best, probably the first celebrity footballer and a man known for his heroic exploits on the pitch, in the bar, and in the bedroom, had three E-Types.
American automotive journalist Henry Manney III, with a timely flourish of ear-appropriate sexism, called it “the greatest crumpet catcher known to man.” Are you in a spandex-clad metal band? Don’t shove armadillos in your trousers – stick a 1:18 die-cast E-Type model down there instead. Forget figuratively, it is literally a dick on wheels. Part of me can’t help feeling that part of the E-Type’s enduring appeal to the male enthusiast is that deep down in the lizard part of their brain, they think it will make them irresistible. If the Mini was the classless part of Carnaby Street and the Swinging Sixties, the E-Type was déclassé.
A lot of my antipathy towards British sports cars of the sixties is based on the fact I felt they represented a nation in post war decline – fashionable on the surface while doing little to advance the state of the art underneath. The E-type was of the moment when it was released in 1961, but being based on a racer that last won Le Mans in 1957 it was trading on former glory. You might think I’m being harsh, but in 1963, just two years after the E-Type launched, the C2 Corvette, Porsche 911 and Mercedes Pagoda all appeared, advancing the state of the sports car art in very different ways while simultaneously making the E-Type look very old hat indeed.
Finally wheezing off the stage like Jumpsuit Elvis in 1974, despite several aborted attempts Jaguar never really replaced the E-Type properly until the F-Type appeared in 2013. That car dies this year as Jaguar rebrands itself as a maker of high-end EVs.
The Corvette, 911 and SL continued to evolve and stay relevant, and are all still in production.
All images courtesy of Jaguar Media
Before reading this I thought I didn’t like the E-Type because it wasn’t the D-Type. Growing up there was a white E-Type with red Stones Hot-Lips sculpted around the grill opening street parked in my hood. Even as a tween my thought was “Smashing for you, but I prefer ladies!”
Hot take: There are multiple ways to make a car look good, multiple design languages that can work, different people have different tastes, and this article reeks of snobbery because this car is an example of an older school of thought than the author is used to.
Yeah it doesn’t look like modern cars, or any of the types of cars you were trained to design, because it’s far older than that and could get away with things a designer no longer can for safety and aerodynamics reasons. Older car styling is increasingly an acquired taste nowadays because they are so far removed from what cars look like now, but that doesn’t mean they look “bad.”
The E-type is not my favorite car of all time by any means, but I roll my eyes at everyone hating on it nowadays because it seems to me most of y’all want to hate it BECAUSE so many people like it, and you can think of no better way to be “original” than saying you don’t like it.
If it’s popular, there’s probably very good reason for it, and hating it because it’s popular is the most unoriginal thing you can do. The E-type is one of the most overhated cars nowadays, can’t you make even a modicum of effort into being just a little bit original? Find something actually interesting to hate if you’re gonna get snobby about styling.
One doesn’t hate something because it’s popular, but is reminded that they hate it because it’s often seen. It’s easier to hate an E-Type than, for an example, a Daimler SP250 – in spite of the SP250 being substantially worse – because you see E-Types regularly and nobody gives a shit about an SP250.
I should note that I do not hate the E-Type so long as it doesn’t have a roof, I’m just annoyed by the “well you only like/hate it because it’s popular” nonsense. It reinforces the opinion, it doesn’t dictate it.
I do hate it because it’s popular, but that’s not the only reason.
SP250 has a delightful engine though.
Some people LOVE to hate things because they are popular. And they love to tell you all about it. Their comments usually look like this, “Can someone please explain to me the appeal of [wildly popular thing that I am too cool to like}?”
My contrarian credentials long predate internet click bait.
Haha, I did not mean to imply that you were doing this (although I realize now it reallyreallyreally seems like I meant to imply that).
One of my strengths as a designer (and a tutor) is to ask the awkward questions no one else dares.
Well put, the old, I’m the cool rebel kid cause I hate what everybody likes take. Not exactly new or novel.
I’d put up a poster of a contemporary Giulia GT long before an E Type. That pinched fish mouth is not my jam in the slightest
I like the catfish mouth fine, personally. However the greenhouse and other rear end proportions bother me. Third strike is the exhaust routing.
Also agree with the 120 being better looking.
I once got into a lengthy tirade at another car website, about a fellow who claimed he had all the parts to put together a 120, but couldn’t be arsed to actually do so. I was incensed.
The wife drives a Jag currently (XJ-L Portfolio with all the bells and whistles) and I think even that model looks better than an E Type.
I dunno. Whenever conventional wisdom calls something the acme of beauty, that very claim simply amplifies its imperfections to me. I must be an innate contrarian.
“When you enroll at car design school you are not handed a big book of Car Design Rules that Are Not To Be Broken”
But if there was a car design book and I had any say, rule #1 would be “using oversized wheels and unrealistically low profile tires is BANNED”
And on the windshield curve issue, I’m guessing you’re not a fan of the Saab 99 or original Saab 900, eh?
They seem to have as much of a windshield curve:
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/785807834973565991/
https://steadysaabin.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/saab-900-gle_1979-e1432124969959.jpg
It’s not so much the curve of the windshield, but the awkward angle it forces the A pillar into.
Guys, he’s right. The E-type doesn’t look good. It’s not even the best looking car that looks like an E-type. The Toyota 2000GT is a knockoff E-type that looks much much better than the real thing.
Some much better contenders for most beautiful car of all time, and I’m not joking:
Delorean
65 Mustang notchback
Honda CRX
Volvo 240
Jeep Cherokee XJ
2015-2023 facelift Dodge Challenger
Datsun Z
Mk3 Honda Prelude
There are a few others that I think are also amazing in very different ways, like:
78-79 Bronco
Jeep SJ Wagoneer, Cherokee, pickups
Honestly, squarebodys, especially GMCs, depending on grille style and paint colors
Jeep TJ(and YJ)
I’d love to hear more additions to the list of amazing-looking and underrated cars that are totally better than an E-type.
Appealing
No
No
Hahahaha fuck no are you blind
Decent
Excellent
Single handedly made Nissan in the US
Anonymous
What family sedan do you think has an all around better design than the 240? I think the design is very true to the car: not trying to be cool or sporty, just trying to be transportation, and in a durable and dependable way. I appreciate that honest design, and it has an elegance to it.
I really am curious to see what you like better.
Peugeot 406. Hands down one of the best sedans ever designed.
As long as it’s pre-facelift. Plus, it allowed the 406 coupe to exist!
Obviously. You can’t facelift perfection.
That’s what my plastic surgeon keeps telling me.
An an American, I had to look up what a Peugot 406 looks like…. And that is the most generic ass 1999 Honda Accord I have ever seen. Unless it’s a facelift, then it’s got a Dodge Stratus front end. This might be the only Peugot that would blend perfectly into the background of cars in the CVS parking lot.
If you think that’s a masterpiece of design, then every Camry and Accord is also perfection.
The 505 is so much better, it’s nothing too special but at least it’s not a late 90s suppository like every other sedan.
What? The 406 looks nothing like an Accord or a Stratus.
I’m with you on the 505 though.
I personally think the 605 is a better execution of the same design ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They sold about five of those. I don’t think there are any left on the road.
If you hadn’t said family sedan I would have been able to more strongly argue that the E38 7 series is the best sedan design.
Ehh, they’re not bad, and they’re better in person than in pictures, but I prefer both previous 7 series. And just about any 5 series, an e12 5 series is one good looking sedan.
As far as best sedan designs go, don’t forget this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_W126
I’d love to read your analysis of the Datsun Z, whose creator literally said featured dick inspired shapes.
TIL why I’ve always loved the Datsun Z …
Love the Datsun 240Z and the Volvo 240.
I don’t know if they’re underrated, but these would get my vote for some of the most beautiful cars ever:
1963 Studebaker Avanti
Citroen DX
Never really understood Avanti love, they’re more weird than good. And the SM is totally the best Citroen, hands down.
Vive la différence!
The Avanti is stunning from behind, but goofy from the front. The good kind of weird, but not beautiful to my eye.
Rear 3/4 view of an Avanti is pretty hot. Front… yeah not so much.
Citroen SM and CX too.
Datsun 510 has always seemed the epitome of the 3-box shape to me.
The 2000GT takes every aspect of the E-Types styling and improves it. It’s a much more resolved design in my opinion.
Also the E-Type isn’t even the best looking vintage Jag. Excluding the examples you have already listed, there’s still the XJ13 to talk about.
The XJ13 was the best example of Sayer’s work. I didn’t include it because it came a little later. And there was only one.
You certainly have an eye for modern automotive design, but you’re judging the E-type by modern design rules.
Part of why it’s so well-liked is because it is so obviously a product of the 1960s.
The rules as much as they are, concern from, proportion and balance. As such they’re universal and not tied to a specific time.
There are much better products of the sixties.
Wrong. Modern design principles are designed for modern cars, with modern considerations. Classic cars are free to look however they want, and don’t have to follow your silly rules.
Telling the professional designer his rules are silly is hilarious.
It would be if he was a professional electrician or plumber or whatever where following the rules makes things safe and functional, but styling is entirely subjective, and there are few things that grind my gears more than people forcing their opinion on others when it comes to styling. “Rules” are fine to a point, as a suggestion only. When you follow them too closely, you get boring stuff like mid-2000s BMWs, which don’t look bad by any means, but are so generic that anyone not eating sleeping and breathing BMW quickly forgets which one is which.
These “rules of design” are ultimately peer pressure from the opinion of some dude who wrote a book once, and people arbitrarily decide to treat their words as gospel. And it absolutely gets taken too far.
The E-type’s designer wasn’t following these rules and likely never heard of them, so why should he be criticized by a standard he was unaware of? He was making art, pure and simple. Drawing something carefully until it looked good to his eye. You’re allowed not to like it, and to consider it not your taste, but ultimately consideration WAS taken to make it look beautiful by the standards of the day.
I have the same issue with the minimalism trend that’s so prevalent nowadays. Some German guy wrote his opinion down and then designed a bunch of products that were influential, and now designers treat his ideas like divine instruction without even understanding what the point of it all was, and the result is SO MANY bland, soulless products with uninteresting designs, which designers and critics drool over for no reason other than them being minimalist to a fault.
Designs that “break the rules” and do something unexpected are my favorites, because you know what? They’re interesting! They’re fun to look at! And after a while, your eye adjusts to it, you let go of the idea that things need to follow the rules and be a certain way, and you say, “You know what? I like that. It looks good to me.” Just because its design language is odd, doesn’t mean it’s bad.
The E-type is VERY odd by modern standards, and that’s exactly what makes it so much fun to look at. It’s exciting and bold. I don’t need anyone with design experience to tell me if I should like it or not, I can think for myself and see with my own eyes that it looks good.
“but styling is entirely subjective”
Yeah I quit reading here. That’s not true at all. You’d know that if you were educated about design.
I’ve been educated in design plenty. I was an art major before changing paths, and afterwards continued learning and researching design on my own, about various designers, artistic movements, styles and design languages, advice on how to do all of it well…
And you know what it taught me? People have WILDY different tastes! Which are OFTEN conflicting! And they can RARELY agree! And people who design enough things that many people like tend to develop massive egos, decide their aesthetic preferences are the RIGHT one and all others are wrong, and then teach this to all their students, indoctrinating them into a cult of ego. Which is why you can go to multiple design schools and be taught different things which often contradict each other.
In the art world, this is called multiple art styles, design languages, and genres existing, and is generally not a problem.
In the automotive world, you get brain rot of designers refusing to admit that what makes them happy might not make someone else happy, and thinking that gives them the right to mock whatever that other person likes.
What it ultimately comes down to is light reflects off object, light enters eye, eye tickles the brain meat, the brain meat decides if it likes being tickled that way, and if so it releases the happy chemicals. Everyone’s brain is different, therefore everyone’s aesthetic preferences are different, and “goog design” is ultimately subjective.
Heck, the BMW Clownshoe, a car our own Adrian Clarke thinks is hideous, just got featured here in an article about a smart woman who owns 8 of them and says, “I had never seen a more beautiful car in my life, it reminded me of the Jaguar in the movie Harold and Maude, which is still my favorite movie.” She’s a talented painter too, so I think she knows a thing or two about art.
She thinks it’s beautiful, therefore to her it is good design. What gives you the right to say she’s wrong for thinking it’s beautiful? I don’t care what your educational background is, we all have eyes and can decide for ourselves what’s beautiful.
That third-from-last (pen-penultimate?) paragraph was well stated. I claim to be all about function over form, but there are objects which give me pleasure I can’t parse. I have two lamps I cherish: one is a sort of organic, upwelling mushroom in a dull red; the other has an industrial cupped shade and bendy neck anchored in a sand cast oval base I rescued from the prop shop and rewired. The only Art on my wall is a print of Peter Acshwanden’s Exploded Beetle—though I do aspire to having an oil copy of Cézanne’s Still Life With Pepermint Bottle.
Those 4 items do not at all go together—but all produce happy chemicals for me. I appreciate you articulating that.
The driveway is a dichotomy as well: the shabby Bugeye wrx wags its tail saying, ‘C’mon, let’s go explore that mountain: I know we can make it!’, while the MRoadster purrs, ‘You know I’m going to kill you—but, isn’t flirting fun?’
very different ethos, but both engender joy
Antepenultimate.
The one before that is the pre-antepenultimate.
Then linguists stopped needing more words like that, because there aren’t any known linguistic phenomena anchored at the end of a word affecting 5 syllables earlier in the word.
Thanks. I actually knew that once—back when my brain was more plastic with fewer patches of JB Weld 🙂
What is your profession?
> I have the same issue with the minimalism trend that’s so prevalent nowadays. […] the result is SO MANY bland, soulless products with uninteresting designs, which designers and critics drool over for no reason other than them being minimalist to a fault.
I’m going to assume this excludes cars, because the current trend is pretty overwrought and the opposite of minimalistic, what with the multiple light assemblies, corners and curves and angles and character lines, squinty headlights, fancy heckblende, etc.
I’d say current car design is, in general, awful. Too many elements, vying for attention, causing your eye to go everywhere in an attempt to hide utter shit proportions. C pillars on a lot of cars today make even 20″ wheels look tiny. It’s terrible, but crash standards are going to force everything upwards (ugly)
You really expect cars from the early 1900’s to abide by modern car design principles? Many early cars didn’t even have windshields or pillars at all, so how the heck are they supposed to abide by some design principle of where those lines converge?
You can nitpick Adrian’s critique if you want, but design is not that subjective. There is a reason MOST people find the E type attractive. Professional designers understand proportion and form better than most people, ignorant people claim that ‘everyones opinion is just as valid’ and that ‘it’s all subjective’, but it is not. You learn all these principles and tips and tricks in design school. Collectively they make more attractive designs.
Design people are the fuckin’ worst.
You didn’t even answer the question. You really expect a Bugatti Type 35 to follow the “dash to axle” ratio? Feck no. A ’29 Alfa 6C Super Sport has no pillars to make a converging line from, and the hood is ridiucously long and it looks fantastic. You might hate them. It’s subjective.
Armchair designers that pretend everything is entirely subjective are the worst. They don’t know what they are talking about. Any ‘highly regarded’ design follows good design principles. That doesn’t mean the dash to axle ratio needs to be perfect, as the E type states. You can bend and push rules around, but the overall things you learn as a professional designer still exist. Design is not ‘everyones opinion is equally valid’; that’s the same stupid argument that anti-vaxxers use to pretend they’re smarter than doctors, scientists, and microbiologists.
Are you really trying to say “design” and “taste” is scientifically backed? If that were the case, no designs would be subjective at all as long as the followed the “rules”. Which couldn’t be further from the case. Plenty of vehicle follow all the design rules and yet get panned for being ugly at worst, boring at best. Then there are ones that break all the rules and are acclaimed.
This “design gatekeeping” is hilarious.
Taste is subjective, good design is not. Appearance is only one aspect of what constitutes design. A car can be attractive without necessarily being a good design. A ’59 Cadillac is a monstrous over the top thing, but it would be churlish to suggest it’s repellent. Likewise a Fiat Multipla is by all accounts challenging to look at, but that doesn’t negate it’s charm and the underlying brilliance of it’s overall design.
Design is a process, not an outcome. Everything is designed, either well or badly. How good or bad design is judged is on how well a car fulfills it’s intended brief (mostly).
Do we judge old cars by the same standards we judge newer ones? No, because design as a discipline as it applies to cars hadn’t really been codified back in the twenties and thirties, and there was a wide variety of construction methods and layouts still being used. The product wasn’t mature. That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss their appearance and relevance and how they influenced the car going forwards, because in it’s essence that’s what talking about car design is all about.
Disagree. Your statement implies that “good design” is universal and not subjective. You can’t possibly insist that even trained well respected designers all agree on what is a good design and what doesn’t. I’m not talking about taste or attractiveness.
Actually, we generally do.
Objective means 100%. “Generally” does not.
Plus, how do you account for things like many of Bangle’s designs, where they were near universally panned, but today they are received very differently. While better received today, they are still controversial.
They’re better received by some partly because the passage of time has lessened their impact, partly because everything else that has come since is so much worse, and partly because the internet content monster demands constant hot takes with little critical thought. With maybe one exception (E60) I along with my peers still think they’re ghastly.
Ok, so the question is, what objective design rules does the E65 violate? The ones you’ve complained about for the E-type are satisfied when it comes to the E65; the pillars converge, the dash/axle ratio appears fine… what. What rules brought up by you (or Hull) does the E65 violate?
I’d also be interested to see a realistic sketch of what the E-type would look like if you “fixed” all these rule violations.
Reading this take on the E-type has about the same effect at this time as listening to a professional musician point out the shortcomings of a favorite Beatle song – the take isn’t wrong per se, but very few hearts or minds will get changed. And sure, the 2+2 and Series III were Coventry’s “Obla-di, Obla-da” and “Old Brown Shoe”, but we’ve known that for ages…
I hear your concerns about the A Pillar – But it was a car of it’s times in 1961, not 1971 or 81.
Look at its contemporaries:
The SL had an upright A pillar with doors that extended forward.
The Corvette had a forward leaning A pillar with doors extending forward.
The Imperial still had it’s 1950s-typical upright A pillar with forward extending doors.
Yes – some manufacturers such as Ferrari, Maserati and Ford had gone to raked A pillars by then. But GM was in curved A pillar land except for the Corvette.
It was a time of transition – and the E Type was designed when the upright A pillar was the fashion of the times.
For my money – the Ferrari 250GT series is generally more beautiful than the Jaguar E Type – but then most people haven’t seen one in person, and can’t discern the various body styles and wheelbases, whereas as an E Type is accessible and simple to understand as a nameplate.
Yeah but none of those cars have the a pillar infringing on the door opening and creating that awful knee destroyer. Obviously the E-type is doing something wrong.
Uh – Yeah they did.
Almost all upright/forward-canted A-pillar cars of the 50’s were renowned for kneecapping people.
Can a car (or person/anything) be simultaneously stunning and awful? From some angles, mostly front 3/4 view the E-type can look stunningly beautiful, from others it’s too narrowly tracked, hunchbacked, clown shoe-d with horrible shutlines and vertical a pillar.
That Autocar most beautiful cars list is so weird it must have been deliberately so for clickbait. Those lists are always subjective, but would be interested in your most beautiful cars ever list as an expert. An Autopian most beautiful car list put together by all the contributors would be even more interesting.
> Can a car (or person/anything) be simultaneously stunning and awful?
Sure! Aztek, Multipla, and many others.
I’ve been looking for a Multipla (pre facelift) to buy, but they seem to have all gone without me noticing. It would be the ideal vehicle for me, my two daughters and our Newfoundland. I can’t face getting a facelifted one, it has such a contrived conventionality I find it offensive.
I don’t blame you, it’d be like dating a Kardashian.
I hate the Beatles with a deep and unstoppable passion, but I don’t mind the E-Typr quite so much. Possibly because the only owner I’ve chatted with had excellent hair, was just as much of a Halloween freak as I am, and had formerly owned a Lancia. So all around my kind of guy. A lot can be forgiven with a good owner, but it is sort of ridiculously phallic and I should know a thing or two there, I used to have a C3 Vette
I like it, without being in love with it.
I don’t hate The Beatles, but am completely Beatles-agnostic. Never understood what the big deal was about their music (I’ll leave history and influence and impact to the specialists). They are not as high in my “What’s the big deal with these guys” book as – say – Nirvana, but they remain quite high up there.
I got driven to Sunday school by my aunt in a 61 E-type that my uncle supposedly won in a poker game. I always thought it might look better with a windshield like on the Bizzarrini 5300, but the view from the inside was perfect. Well the 7 year old me thought so. I thought the exhaust completely outside of the body was perfect too.
If the windshield was more tilted it would either make the passenger space comically small and even farther back or if the base was moved forward over the engine the car would be taller and engine access would be awful. See the Maserati 3500 GT. Actually, Aston Martin and Maserati had remarkably similar mechanical bits, and I think Jaguar did the best in terms of packaging them.
You don’t need to alter the angle of the windscreen. Hold the top of the A pillar in position and move the base forwards slightly.
Yeah, the actual angle and height of the e-type windscreen kind of bugged me, much the same as the ungainly tall windscreens on the Datsun Fairlady 1600 and 2000 roadsters.
As for the angle of the A pillar; the automobile world was in the midst of the the 1959 – 1963 A pillar wars where they were tilting forward, then back with some bends in various directions and confusion about whether the vent windows were visually part of the windscreen or the door. Take the 61 Corvette (Please) for example.
Actually the A pillar wars would be a great topic, for example Ferrari wanted to eliminate them entirely!
Bravo sir.
These things have always felt like a child’s drawing of a sports car or a caricature of a better looking earlier Jaguar.
It looks poorly thought out and like somebody mashed a bunch of ill-fitting parts from the bin together to make a car. The Cheetah also shares this look but it has the excuse of being a race car…
I will make an exception for the E-type lightweight though; mostly because it is a race car and the lack of a fast back and it’s wee little truck adds some balance to the weird ass heavy design of it.
We saw a Cheetah in the paddock at Goodwood. That thing was feral. It makes a Cobra look like a GT.
I saw a ‘tribute’ Cheetah at a show a couple of years back and feral is an excellent descriptor. The body on it looks like it was an afterthought when somebody remembered they had to keep rain and bugs off the driver and engine. I have yet to see any description of them that does not describe them as somewhere between a handful and a near-death experience to drive. The foot well is tiny, off center and got blisteringly hot. Once again, I suspect the driver was an afterthought…
I am pretty sure this one is the one I saw, has some excellent interior shots:
https://thevaultms.com/inventory/1964-cheetah-race-car/
The driver was cramming it into reverse using two hands. We spoke to the driver. He said it was like driving a bomb because you’re surrounded by fuel tanks.
A truly American driving experience then…
You are to the E-Type as I am to E39 BMWs.
OK, I can see that someone might not like the E-Type but the E39 is peak car design. This is a hill I will die on….
My hill is that the E39 is the ultimate expression of everything wrong with ’90s car design – the blobbiest and fattest soap bar in a sea of blobby, fat soap bars.
We can chuck spears at each other from our hills.
It’s a handsome car, but like the E30 there’s nothing groundbreaking about it.
IMO, peak car doesn’t need to be groundbreaking – in fact, by definition it probably is not. It is the best/final evolution of a design ie before the next model was Bangled. (But then, I’m an engineer, not a designer).
This is an interesting comment. Good design doesn’t need to be groundbreaking. But the absolutely gold standards of car design should be, in some aspect.
I have a lot of respect for this take because I had similar feelings after the E39’s debut. The crisp lines of the E38 made that car a tough act to follow, and the E39’s initial design did indeed look like a 7-series shaped bar of soap with all the edges slathered off of it. The tiny twin-kidney nostrils in particular made the snout of the pre-LCI models look bulbous and ungainly. But by the time the M5 rolled out BMW came to their senses and made it appropriately Bruce-y with larger grills, black trim, sportier bumpers and a few other changes across the range. The little things added up and I found myself with a final-year M-sport wagon that continues to draw compliments as “still a nice-looking car.” Of all the many things I hate about it, the way it looks isn’t one of them.
Incorrect. The E28 and E34 are peak 5-series. The E39 looks like a 3 series.
Peak sedan is MB’s W126 and yes, I will accept duel requests over this.
I agree, and usually claim at cars and coffee saturday mornings that the 1962 Spitfire 4 is a much more beautiful car (-not the dental brace later ones, yuck!)
I like the Spitfire, but prefer the later (Mk IV?) cars. Probably because they were designed by an Italian.
While I admire the E-type as gorgeous, I definitely agree that the Spitfire is even more so.
I am the weirdo that likes the Mk IIIs with the raised bumper.
I think it’s funny that the XKE and BMW Z3 are discussed on the same day; despite the cars’ broad-stroke similarities, the incongruity of the tenor of the articles (Jag negative, clownshoe positive) reflects the wonderful blend of Autopian content: design matters, but enthusiasm matters more. Thanks team!
The clownshoe is an ugly spud.
Perhaps—but the view from the fun seat is awesome. You are a designer: the car must look good static. I like to drive: I clamber out a bit shaky still riding the adrenaline high, and stumble unsteadily into the house for a sit-down and a soothing cup of tea. And smiling all the way because it didn’t kill me this time
I won’t lie, I love the overexaggerated hood(bonnet) to the cabin of this car, It’s very cartoonish. But I do not like the car, the door line has always killed me, and the generally phallic shape of the E-type just was not my favorite. but my list of cars that are beautiful is a strange one, so who knows about this.
“Put the kettle on (coffee, white, no sugar and don’t bring me any of that freeze-dried instant crap), it’s time for Damn Good Design.”
My Dude, if you want me to read this with coffee (exclusively Lavazza), you’ve got to get cracking much earlier in the day. By the time this arrived, it was time for my post-lunch lemon and honey tea (loose-leaf black Ceylon, if you must know).
Anyway, I respect your right to be wrong, just as you are about “big wheels” on car drawings. The E-type is frickin’ gorgeous. Am I a designer? Hell no. But I know what I like and I LIKE this, but not for any weird penile-related reasons. (All you folks saying the E-type is phallic have some weeeeeird looking junk, I must say. Let me help you out: The Spire building in London – phallic. 30 St Mary Axe in London – phallic. Bezos’ rocket – phallic to the max.) It’s just an aesthetically pleasing design and the one time I saw one in the wild, driving through the mountains of Colorado, I was amazed at how much better it looks in person.
And I also like the Beatles. No, not the early Beatles when they were just copying American rock-n-rollers. But they morphed into a truly great group. Rubber Soul and Revolver are truly great albums, IMHO. They aren’t the best musical group in history, by any means, but when they’re good, they’re amazing.
Anyway, thanks for the enjoyable rant. Your articles are always enjoyable, well written and well thought-out (even when they’re wrong) and I wouldn’t miss a one, so keep ‘em coming!
I didn’t think it was possible to get this much wrong in one comment, but here we are.
I endeavor to provide satisfaction 🙂
I may be a philistine, but I’m a philistine with convictions, dammit.
There’s an empty hill over there you can die on.
Oof, that was harsh, man.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
What makes the E-Type the most phallic car this side of the Ambiguously Gay Duo’s ride is not just the length in front of the windscreen, but the way the cabin (particularly that of the 2+2) completes the package. Does it look like weird junk? For a human, yeah. But every time I see a 2+2 it’s difficult to clear the impression of a male dog on its back. Roll over, boy. Children might ask awkward questions.
OK, for the 2+2, especially in red, along with your explanation – yeah, I’ll give you that, even though it’s a bit of a reach, IMO.
Lavazza is pretty awful fwiw
It’s probably my favourite everyday coffee.
Well, you are from england, so it tracks.
Watch it Folger’s boy.
Hey now, no need for name calling.
Funny, all the women I know like its dash to axle length.
Oh, and it’s 175” long not 145”.
But I do like the smaller version.
https://groupharrington.com/series-1/
> all the women I know like its dash to axle length.
They’re just saying that to make you feel better.
I’m not a huge fan of the E-type, especially hard roof style. I never have been. My primary complaint is that dash to axle distance. It feels 6 inches too long for my tastes. It makes the front end look like its built to house a long engine, and aesthetic results be damned. I realize that is why it was designed this way, but it doesn’t have to FEEL that way.
I’m always a little insulted when people call my GT6 the “poor man’s E-Type”. Michelotti made a better looking, less grotesque looking car, in my opinion.
Too bad the engineers in Coventry did such a rotten job building it.
(I love my car, but I make no excuses about it’s terribleness)
I like them both. I have an old Triumph too. I don’t know if terrible is the word, but you do need to learn to live with their quirks of design. As a lifelong owner of old British cars with some success at keeping them going, my advice is always “drive it until it breaks, and keep fixing it until it stops breaking”.
This is the way. It’s a good thing I enjoy driving it and fixing it!
Wasn’t there also a big factory fire that destroyed a lot of the D-Type tooling, which also prompted the moving on?
One of my coolest fairly recent car memories is not only seeing Steve McQueen’s XKSS up close in person, but being there as it was fired up/driven away. Sooooo cool.
Yes there was, it destroyed the final 8 or so Jaguar XKSS’. Jaguar had planned to build 25 which would have been enough to get it into one of the production classes in SCCA racing IIRC.
Thank you! I couldn’t recall for sure, but it was nagging at me.
I too have always been a heretic and found the E-Type to be… not my favorite.
For a 1960’s designed car with an extra long and phallic hood, I find the 2000GT and 240Z G nose to be far more appealing to my eye. Are they derivative and heavily inspired by the E-Type? 100%. But perfection rarely comes on the first try.
I don’t think they’re that great either. Penismobile is all I can think when I see them. And there is something weird about the rear fender and wheel well area.