24 October 2024 | Market News
When Ian Callum’s new XJ saloon was unveiled in July 2009, it marked a dramatic move away from the long-running model line’s evolutionary styling, which had begun in 1968 with the original XJ6 and had continued right through to the aluminium-bodied X350 of 35 years later. Major change was deemed necessary if Jaguar’s flagship saloon was to appeal to buyers outside the marque’s traditional fan base – and yet compared with its obvious German rivals, the X351 generation wasn’t a commercial success.
From the start of production in early 2010 to its cessation just over nine years later, only around 120,000 X351s were sold worldwide. Even the model’s most successful year of 2013 saw well under 20,000 produced, an annual figure that would more than halve in later years. And yet the Callum-penned XJ had plenty going for it, with a combination of power, refinement and driving pleasure befitting of the Jaguar marque.
Once production ceased, old-stock ‘new’ XJs proved to be a difficult sell, with many dealers offering heavy discounting as a way of shifting final stocks. And these days a last-of-the-line X351 can offer great value, such as this smart example – first registered in September 2020 and available at the time of writing for £27,995.
The car features the familiar 3.0-litre twin-turbo six-cylinder diesel unit that produced 296bhp in this guise, as well as a mighty 516lb.ft of torque. Performance was impressive, with a top speed of 155mph and a 0-60mph sprint time of just 5.9 seconds, smoothly fed through a ZF eight-speed automatic transmission.
The list of on-board equipment makes impressive reading, and the car appears to be in excellent order throughout, with a clean MoT history and a current test that’s valid until October 2025. For further details, check out www.halliwelljones.co.uk.
If you own an X351-generation XJ that was registered even later than this one, the JDC would love to hear from you.
