Test drive Jaguar XK8 1996 - 2002 compartment

Road to Hell

Yesterday he was alive. Yes, it is alive. I drove three hundred kilometers on it. Sometimes - at a speed of 150 km/h. He listened to the radio, felt the confident power of the eight -cylinder engine, bask of leather seats, enjoyed an incredibly smooth movement, more like a flight. On the electronic odometer Jaguar XK8 was only 23.652 kilometers - the very heyday of forces.
Now he is dead. Nothing of this - almost nothing left of him. When you love, it is difficult to survive. But even the indifferent will certainly take longing - at the sight of how ruthlessly destroy such a beautiful and expensive thing in every sense. Thing?
I know, I know, a car is an inanimate object. Even in biology lessons, I learned that there are signs characterizing a living organism. The machine responds to many of them - it breathes, absorbs gases and liquid, converting them into energy, electric impulses pass through it, it even pollutes the environment with waste of its life ... But it does not obviously meet the most important - the ability to independently reproduce.
It doesn’t matter, ”you say,“ that he bears the name of a living creature - it's still only a car consisting of metal, glass, rubber, oil, wood, leather and plastic ... But I am ready to swear that when the fat spider press of the press We reached for the N599 YRW, the car resisted ...
She trembled, she was bending, she tried to break out and rush off on her other almost new wheels. She looked like a kitten, over which a large evil dog mocks. It was a life in the arms of death ...
As a result of this execution, Jaguar received 15 pounds - the price of one and a half tons of scrap metal. Crazy, - you say. - I would pay both 1.500 and 15,000 pounds for such a car. And I would pay. In the end, in serial design it costs 48.623 pounds ... Why did you need to destroy this magnificent beast, a car that many can only dream of?
A little story. Jaguar XK8 with N599 YRW number is a prototype. More precisely, it was a prototype. He was born in March 1995, the fifteenth in a row. He spent most of his life in Germany, where ZF, a transmission manufacturer, worked out on it a stunning 5-speed automatic box, which is now installed on serial machines. Then Jaguar was used to calibrate the electronic brain that controls the transmission. And now, after the completion of the tests, the car, like all its predecessors, was to be destroyed ...
And that's why. Firstly, these cars are too raw so that they can be sold as used. Many of their nodes and details are non -standard. In addition, extreme overloads could lead to premature failure of some of the most vulnerable nodes.
The second reason is purely material. Auto manufacturers do not pay VAT from the cost of prototypes if they are destroyed at the end of the tests. The cost of some specimens rolls over a million pounds, so the tax may be rather big. Even in the case of the relatively cheap N599 YRW, the production of which cost 80,000 pounds, VAT would be 14,000.
There is another reason. Destroying the prototype, the manufacturer completely eliminates the possibility of getting any unsifty parts from it to serial machines. Would you like to get an inexpensive suspension lever that you checked on the Belgian pavers?
The reasons are good. Everything is logical. But here I am standing next to the sparkling black XK8, I look at him ... What is the logic here - despair overwhelm me. Yes, several dents and scratches managed to appear on the sparkling sides, but what a car it is! .. Yes, there are holes on the wings-from the screws that were once attached to the camouflage panels to protect against photographers, but they can be close up In any workshop!
We - two journalists - offered to ride a day on the XK8 before he meets his end. Tim Matthew, in whose hands the fate of all testing Jaguar is located, a person who has already signed hundreds of deaths and got used to his role, nevertheless admitted that every time he sees the process of destroying the machine, he experiences, to put it mildly, not the most pleasant feelings.
I climb inside - and fall into the five -star aura of the cabin. Walnut panel is in full width, inserts of chromium and fabric, a powerful stereo system. The skin of the seats managed to get the perfect - slightly shabby - view.
Tim warned that a car with features. If you switch the programs manually, the engine control computer for some reason transfers it to the Limp-Home emergency mode. The on -board computer has its own quirks - he sequentially reports that the doors are not closed, the electronics does not work and the coolant is overheated. All this is pure water deception. From time to time, the display shows the mileage of the machine - this can be believed.
The car starts instantly and works smoothly and softly - like a meter in a class restaurant. We go to the suburban highway, and after a few moments Jaguar is already silently flying at a speed of 150 km/h. Air conditioning does not work. It doesn’t look neat in the cabin - in some places the upholstery lags behind ... Rushing past the cars moving in the same direction, I think that my Jaguar is more expensive than all of them together, but I immediately remember that tomorrow it will not be tomorrow There is also gasoline, which is now splashing in their tanks.
We are moving out of a busy highway on a quiet highway and passing several sharp turns. The machine behaves perfectly, which is also confirmed by dry words from the on -board magazine. An obedient chassis, a powerful engine, - wrote one of the testers ... That's it. The car has a huge power resource and a large reserve of adhesion to the road, which allows you to confidently pass complex turns at prohibitive speed. It even seems that nothing terrible will happen if you fly to the ditch on it, you will go in reverse into a lamppost or just force all the mechanisms to work on the verge. But I cannot rape him: Jaguar cannot but respect. In addition, I have fun, and he ... he is doomed.
When we returned the car to the Jaguar engineering center to Coventry, and I and the colleague became bad - we suddenly realized what soon had to happen. Matthew drives the car into boxing - this is the last segment of the path that the car passes through. There, the mechanics will merge the oil and the remainder of the fuel and remove the airbags. Last night...
The next day, we follow the truck, in which our XK8 and his comrade in misfortune are silently under the bedspreads - five -year -old Jaguar XJS, on which the new V8 engine was running in. The ultimate goal of our journey is Stratford-on-Evone ... How strange everything is: an iron underworld, absorbing cars, it turns out, is located in Shakespeare's homeland ...
At the Birds metal processing plant, air smells of iron. Around the heap of metal, in which former bicycles and refrigerators, shells and cardboard cabinets, cars and even military armored cars are guessed. The clang and rattle. Hell...
A truck with cars gets into a narrow passage, at the end of which a mechanism with powerful captures loom ominously. He is waiting. The truck drives closer, green covers are torn off the victims ... Then they are unceremoniously pushed from the platform ... The first to the arms of the fork lift falls XK8. Trying to capture Jaguar more restoically, the driver makes a dent on his sparkling side. I am mentally cursed ... The lift is already dragging Jaguar to the sacrifice site, puts it on the ground and leaves.
The captures hang over the machine and are reflected in its sparkling roof. On this cloudless day, among the dirt and piles of metal debris, Jaguar seems especially beautiful. The last moments ...
Captures fall ...
John Brown

Source: Motor magazine [No. 7/1998]