Jaguar to build £700,000 hybrid supercar with Williams

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Jaguar has unveiled plans to build a £700,000 ($1.15m) petrol-electric hybrid supercar in the UK.

It will build 250 cars in partnership with Formula 1 team Williams F1.

The C-X75's ultra-light chassis and two electric engines will help it accelerate from nought to 60mph in three seconds.

It will have an all-electric range of 50km and its overall emissions of less than 100g CO2 per kilometre will be one of the lowest in the industry.

The car will have a top speed of more than 200mph, while the hybrid engine will extend the car's range well beyond 50km.

The move is part of a £5bn investment plan, announced by Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) in March at the Geneva motor show, to launch 40 "significant new products" over the next five years.

Production of the C-X75 will create more than 100 highly-skilled jobs in the UK. These will be split between Jaguar and Williams, which is based in Grove in Oxfordshire.

The model will be built from 2013 until 2015, although it has not yet been decided where production will take place.

Jaguars are currently manufactured at Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham, although JLR's headquarters are in Warwickshire.

'Clear business case'

The car offers proof that if they are well-engineered, efficient cars with low CO2 emissions can also deliver high performance.

This points to "a sustainable future, but not a boring future", Mr Forster said.

As such, it marks a shift from the past when manufacturers would build high-performance flagship models to show off their capabilities to buyers of frugal, ordinary versions of the same cars.

The logic that anyone who can build a high-performance car should also be able to build good cars with small engines no longer holds, as there is a growing realisation that it is much more difficult to build a car that combines speed and handling with low fuel consumption.

"There is a clear business case for this exclusive halo model," Jaguar brand director Adrian Hallmark said.

Capabilities and skills

The car is central to the Indian-owned luxury car company JLR's plan to establish itself as a technology-inspired carmaker.

"It is a showcase of our capabilities and of the hi-tech engineering skills that exist within Jaguar and Williams F1," said Carl-Peter Forster, chief executive of JLR's parent company Tata Motors.

"This is a showcase of what can be done in this country if we all pull together."

The partnership between JLR and Williams F1 is part of the Formula 1 team's plan to extend the number of business areas from which it earns revenue, following hot on the heels of rival McLaren's expansion into, among other things, road car production and GT3 racing.

"In recent years, hybrid technology has been an area of acute development in Formula 1," said Williams F1 chairman Adam Parr, insisting it is only one example of F1 technology that could prove useful in other industries.

Williams F1 is in the process of creating subsidiaries that will sell its technology to companies elsewhere in the motor industry, or even in other industries such as energy, aerospace or health.

Completely out of the blue this one! Obviously Williams' work will be on the hybrid technology, I wonder if they are still going to push their flywheel technology or if they are simply going to further develop its battery technology?
 
It doesn't mention if it will utilize the tiny turbines that the concept used for charging the batteries.
 
Monkey sees 918 Spyder, money does 918 Spyder?

Just kidding, of course, but I kinda think the styling looks pretty dull...
 
Although I quite like the concept, I'm not sure Jaguar have the brand cache to sell £700k cars, no matter how good they are.
 
It doesn't mention if it will utilize the tiny turbines that the concept used for charging the batteries.

On the Jaguar website it says that Jaguar will keep working on turbine technology, but this car will now use a 'highly boosted' petrol engine with KERS technology. So it's like the XJ220 but more eco friendly. It also has a blown rear diffuser as well, like an F1 car.
 
Because buyers really want to pay £700K for a four-pot. Since it's no in the OP, I've said that as the mian engine of this car will be a 1.6l Turbo four, yes a four cylinder in a car costing almost three-quarters of a million.
 
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Glad to see that what is essence in the XJ220's successor is going to get built because the concept car was beautiful but I'm surprised at Williams involvement, having they got better things to be getting on with seeing as they have had the worst start to an F1 season for 30 years! I feel hybrid supercars are somewhat of a gimmic and would just prefer some huge V10.
 
And just anounced on the one show with quest Richard Hammond [from top gear] that the first few will have a full blown williams formula 1 engine in it, hybrids to follow.
 
Love that it has to be an alphabet soup name that could be confused with the latest Mazda crossover.
 
Love that it has to be an alphabet soup name that could be confused with the latest Mazda crossover.

It's a bit like the Ferrari F1 2011 car and the Ford F150 - there were troubles that you would get confused between the two. Yeah, really...
 
Although I quite like the concept, I'm not sure Jaguar have the brand cache to sell £700k cars, no matter how good they are.

No, I think they can pull it off - Jaguar's image has improved dramatically the past few years. Hopefully Jaguar got their timing down for their next Halo car; barring another world recession, this one should sell! It's got all the right stuff.

Hello, XJ220 successor!
 
What a nice surprise. If it is still turbine-powered it will be a instant hit, even though it does carry a stratospheric price tag.

Nice one Jag. 👍
 
Glad to see that what is essence in the XJ220's successor is going to get built because the concept car was beautiful but I'm surprised at Williams involvement, having they got better things to be getting on with seeing as they have had the worst start to an F1 season for 30 years! I feel hybrid supercars are somewhat of a gimmic and would just prefer some huge V10.

Come on, thats a bit of a silly statement*. Obviously the Williams people working on this are not going to be direct-F1 people, just as the McLaren personnel who work on the MP4-12C are not F1 aerodynamicists or engineers.
If anything, right now Williams appears to be a far more successful business than it is an F1 team, their hybrid technology company appears to be getting quite a bit of work from Porsche to now here with Jaguar.
If anything, this will help the F1 team survive as the Williams company as a whole will at least be self-sustainable hopefully. Losing RBS and other major sponsors might not be as much of a blow this way.
This is no different to how Prodrive run..or even Team Lotus now.

*I realise you were commenting in jest. :P
 
Of course jag will be able to sell these. It's green (99g Co2), fast (800BHP), timeless styling (it will grow on you over time) and ha F1 connections. It doesn't matter that it's a 4 pot, thats just the auxiliary charging system! Fisker is using the same principle and that will sell well. The Porsche 918 is not the original, the Fisker Karma has been in development much longer.

The days of big V10's are numbered. Why develop one if the future has to be green for products to appeal to so many. Plus, this will help Jag towards it's overall Co2 targets. If they develop this tech now it can be used in more applications over time.
 
And it looks like this car is moving along again, it appears now to have an engine of sorts.
Top Gear.com
10,000rpm from a 1.6-litre Jag four-pot? Oh yes. This is the sound of the future, Internet. And it sounds like 500bhp…

The engine of the C-X75 hypercar is safe to this dizzying figure. Top Gear heard, and saw, the prototype engine safely doing this today, its turbo glowing red-hot . It makes 500bhp from 1.6 litres and has a supercharger and a turbo.
Audio clip
 
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This will be as relevant as the One-77. So few will be built and sold that it'll lose steam in the press, and die quietly.

But I hope not. It sounds like a pretty neat car.
 
Top Gear.com
10,000rpm from a 1.6-litre Jag four-pot? Oh yes. This is the sound of the future, Internet. And it sounds like 500bhp…

The engine of the C-X75 hypercar is safe to this dizzying figure. Top Gear heard, and saw, the prototype engine safely doing this today, its turbo glowing red-hot . It makes 500bhp from 1.6 litres and has a supercharger and a turbo.
Audio clip
Hearing the supercharger disengage and turbo kick in is nice. You can hear a slight delay in turbo response, but that's to be expected.
 
sumbrownkid
Isn't supercharing + Turbocharging old technology though? Especially with the emergence of Variable-geometry turbos?

Well they're both rather old with them both emerging in the 80's. And just because it's old technology doesn't mean it's bad.
 
Well they're both rather old with them both emerging in the 80's. And just because it's old technology doesn't mean it's bad.

Not saying it's bad, but with supercharging sapping some power to make power, and with the added complexity, it seems odd that they went with that route.
 
Jaguar C-X75 Supercar Canceled

The Jaguar C-X75 supercar has been axed. Global brand director Adrian Hallmark confirmed that the decision not to put the radical hybrid into production had been taken due to the current global economic crisis.

Five working prototypes will continue to be developed until next May. Up to three of these will then be sold at auction, while one will go into a future Jaguar museum and the other will be kept by Jaguar for running demonstrations.

"We feel we could make the car work, but looking at the global austerity measures in place now, it seems the wrong time to launch an £800,000 to £1 million supercar," said Hallmark. "This is backed up by other products from us that people are screaming out for."

Hallmark said the undisclosed investment in the C-X75 would not be wasted, and 60 per cent of its technology would filter through to future Jaguars. The hybrid technology, he said, could be used on a three-cylinder engine to give it the power of a six-cylinder engine.

The C-X75's sophisticated aerodynamics should also influence future Jaguars, while the high-pressure supercharger technology could be used on future performance Jaguars with four-cylinder engines.

Hallmark said the relationship with Williams would end in May when the project died, but he expected the pair to work again in the future.
Autocar
 
I suppose there is some sense in canning the CX-75 project as Jaguar needs a new 3-Series rival more than it needs a new hypercar, especially after the monumental failure that was the XJ220.
 
I have a sneaky suspicion that the CX-75 isn't completely dead yet. Ferrari, McLaren and Porsche are all releasing hypercars, so the market must be there (so the reason for it being axed is obsolete) and those Jaguars look very well finished, production ready even. I find it odd that they are allowing press test drives for a car that won't be produced.
 
I have a sneaky suspicion that the CX-75 isn't completely dead yet. Ferrari, McLaren and Porsche are all releasing hypercars, so the market must be there (so the reason for it being axed is obsolete) and those Jaguars look very well finished, production ready even. I find it odd that they are allowing press test drives for a car that won't be produced.

They blame the economy and I understand that. They need to focus more on their executive cars more. Jaguar building a new hypercar in when the economy has been this bad would've been a huge mistake just like the XJ220.
 

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