Automental Car Concept - Jaguar XJS Lynx Eventer Knowles & Wilkins

I shouldn't be writing this. So much to do, but today is Sunday and here you are, another feasible dream car project of the automental to-do-list. The second Automental car after the Ford S-MAX SVT. This time, I invite you to share my love for shooting brakes.

For the non-initiated, shooting brakes are 2 door estates or station wagons with a low and long roof-line. Most achingly beautiful shooting brakes are derivatives from great front engine sportscars, or GT cars. Some extremely rich Ferrari enthousiasts like the Sultan of Brunei have such cars built by Pininfarina and the like. Sometimes, some small manufacturers are attempting small series of conversions...

Photos from LynxEventer.com :-)

One of those and probably the most famous conversions is the Lynx Eventer. The estate version of the Jaguar XJS (1975 to 1996) hand-built by the Jaguar specialist Lynx 67 times from 1982 to 2002. Rather than me continuing on the Lynx Eventer story, just check out LynxEventer.com, the site of a french enthousiast which reads like the compendium on Lynx Eventer.
My Automental Eventer would be a later model, post-facelift. I usually don't like the blackened rear lights of the last generation XJS, but they harmonise very well with the elegant and subdued tail of the Eventer. I also prefer the more modern and elegant alloys to those eightiesh classic ones. My Automental Eventer would be black, dark grey or dark blue. And I would get rid of that tape like stripe along the side of the Eventer. On normal Jag XJS they look as if they belong, but on the Eventer they contrast too much these elegant long lines of the roof and the window. The crease does not need such cheap emphasis.



So now to the mechanics. As Top Gear's James May noted*, the XJS were desirable but flawed. The Eventer takes the XJS from desire to lust and Knowles and Wilkins tackle the flawed parts. The engine, the electronics, the built quality and the handling. K and W rebuilds Jags "serially" :-) They give them a makeover, they improve them substantially, but it is not a restauration. This way the costs of such a transformation are relatively moderate. K and W underline that by pitching such a conversion as an alternative to modern executive limousines by Audi , BMW, Merc & co. And looking at the result - why not?

They also do engine conversion to LPG Autogas, if something is missing, it might be the lack of additional airbags...

What makes it Automental, you might ask. All you need is buying an Eventer and drive to K and W. Well, yes, but there are only 67 of them, and of those just a few facelift versions. So why not get the original tooling used by Lynx and start converting the next 100 XJS... There is a project :-)

*Top Gear is on topgear.com. unfortunately videos usually don't work for those outside the UK and the KWE XJS review is missing on that page for whatever reason... There is Topgear on YouTube, of course, but only a small selection of clips. Therefore until TopGear finally posts this old episode I used the one above. Otherwise full episodes can be found on streetfire.net and best of all finalgear.com. BTW there is also a nice XJS episode of the WheelerDealers.

Please read also Vantage Vintage post for more on KWE. The article was originally published here.

Photos and a lot of information from LynxEventer.com. Despite several attempts, Blogger at the time of the writing just didn't offer to "web link" the pictures and directly pull the photos from their site of origin. Therefore sorry for the current location on blogspot / Picasa.