XKSS Continuation

1957 Jaguar XKSS Continuation

Offered by RM Sotheby’s | Elkhart, Indiana | October 23-24, 2020

Photo Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s

The XKSS was the road-going version of the Jaguar D-Type racing car. Basically, Jaguar had unsold D-Types that they converted to sell to Americans who wanted a high-performance sports car. They planned to build 25 of them, but a fire broke out at the factory in February 1957 after only 16 were sold.

So in 2016, Jaguar decided they would build the other nine that never got completed back in the day. From scratch. They digitally scanned a few surviving XKSS cars and built the new ones using the same construction methods from the 1950s. Major changes include a modern fuel cell and redesigned seats. Power is from a 3.4-liter inline-six that Jaguar rated at 250 horsepower in 1957.

So what do we have here exactly? Well, it depends on how much of an asshole you want to be (pardon my French). Whoever edited the Wikipedia article for these referred to them as “replicas” (presumably the page was edited by an actual XKSS owner or some Jag purist). At the same time, this is a factory-built XKSS. It wasn’t built by Tempero or some other actual “replica” builder. True, it might not be an “actual” XKSS from 1957, but it’s still a Jaguar product. It’s almost certainly more authentic than any “continuation” Cobra out there.

When Jaguar announced this program, they noted that they were going to charge over $1 million for them. And they sold. But this is the first time one of the “new” ones has come up for sale. An XKSS from the ’50s will run you over $10 million. This one, which was built in 2017 and has 51 miles on it, will sell without reserve. So we’re all about to find out its real value. Click here for more info and here for more from this sale.

Update: Sold $1,985,000.

2 thoughts on “XKSS Continuation

  1. I don’t agree it should be called a replica; a loaded-word which in this industry often implies “fake” . To replicate something is exactly to copy it and, for good reasons, the newer XK-SSs have many detail differences. Had Jaguar done a run of them in 1958 or 1959, I suspect there’d anyway have been differences from the originals; continuation seems a good word.
    It’s good to see this sort of thing being done. Ferrari owns the old Scaglietti factory and I doubt they’d find it difficult to sell continuation stuff were they to construct the fifteen 275GTB/4 NART Spyders planned as part of a run of twenty-five in 1967-68 but never built.

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