foolhandy

I’ve just listened to the CAR Magazine podcast interview of the Jaguar XF designer Ian Callum. Readers were invited to ask questions about the design and some of them would be put to Callum. So I asked about the lack of concrete visual links to Jaguar’s design heritage. I mentioned that Chris Bangle had kept a few old design traits when he revolutionised BMW design, and that that worked because he wasn’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater - as I feel that Ian Callum has done with the XF. And they asked him my question!

His answer was that you could see clues around the DLO (day light opening - side window shape) and in the surface of the headlamps, but the XF was more about recreating the true values of Jaguar design rather than simply updating the old model. Jaguar’s should be beautiful cars, and that’s what the XF is.

I’m not so sure about that myself. I wouldn’t call it beautiful myself and it doesn’t say Jaguar to me at all either in detail or overall design values. Still, he said in answer to another question that we ought to wait and see it in the metal before we judge it completely - I will do just that.

One final thing. I have been quoted in the press (local papers & various car magazine letters pages - impressive eh?) a number of times and more often that not my name is given as Karl Hardy. It was again in this podcast. I typed an N, it wasn’t my handwriting. It’s an N! It’s Handy! When I read my name ina a paper or hear my name in a podcast I’d like to be called Handy please! It’s just being lazy to presume otherwise. That is all…