If at first you don’t succeed, try, try (and try) again.
The 2015 Jaguar C-X75 from Spectre is finally street-legal to the work of Callum Design. The British firm has unveiled a road-going version of one of its most memorable concepts nearly a decade-and-a-half after it made its debut.
The coupé debuted at the 2010 Paris Motor Show and was meant to be a forward-thinking callback to Jaguar’s glory days. It paired a stunning design that called to mind the brand’s 1990s supercars with a hybrid powertrain unlike anything before (or since). The unique setup was to include four electric motors and two turbines that ran on either natural gas, diesel, or biofuels to keep the vehicle’s battery charged. It was about as outlandish as concepts come, but that didn’t stop the marque from announcing plans to build 250 examples of the car with Williams Advance Engineering.
The 2015 Jaguar C-X75 from “Spectre”
Callum Design
This turns out to have been a tad ambitious, as the C-X75 would never end up going into production. By the time the project was cancelled only a small number of prototypes had been built. Jaguar would eventually find a use for those vehicles, though. They would end up sharing the screen with Daniel Craig in 2015’s Spectre, the 24th James Bond film, where featured as the car driven by Dave Bautista’s villainous Mr. Hinx character.
It’s one of these cars that the C-X75’s original designer Ian Callum’s eponymous firm has now made street-legal. Unsurprisingly, the car doesn’t have the futuristic powertrain that Jaguar had initially teased. Instead, it, and the other three stunt cars used to film Spectre, are powered by a supercharged 5.0-liter V-8. There were still “hundreds” of other changes and improvements that needed to be made before the car could be driven on public roads in the U.K.
Callum Design
The car had to be completely re-engineered, which involved revising its engine calibration and equipping it with new catalytic converters and a quieter exhaust system, according to a press release. Changes had to be made to the body as well. The vehicle was completely repainted, its carbon-fiber trim was refinished, and all its panel gaps were reduced and aligned. It was also fitted with new wing mirrors.
A street-legal C-X75 will never go into production, but you will at least get to see this particular example in person. The best-looking Jaguar in recent memory will make its public debut at the Bicester Heritage Scramble on April 21 in Oxfordshire.
