Hi gents. Has anyone around here in the US removed their end dummy lights in the rear lamp cluster to make the car look like U.K. spec? I am not sure what Geoff Lawson intended when he face-lifted the car, but the UK cars don’t have the dummy lamps on account of the wider license plates, or we have them on account of our more narrow ones. I have been thinking about removing mine, but I am not sure how it would look with the US plate. Seems like the rear looks less heavy on the U.K. spec cars without those dummy lamps.

What do do you think looks better ?

My car with the dummy lamps



An EbayUK car without them

 

You would have to fill in the fixing holes. I think it looks better because of the smaller plate.

 

I prefer the dummy lamps in place. The idea clearly seems to have been to create a single long swath across the back, rimmed by chrome top and bottom, only the long UK plates made that tricky over there. I'd also expect the design was based on the US market, due to the volume of sales there. The dummies also curve in to meet the plate area, whereas the UK ones just look chopped off.

 

I would expect the design to be based of the U.K. market. Like the sealed single lens composite headlamps. That was the original design from the start for the XJS, and actually back to the first E types with sealed lamps, but had to be modified from their original design for the US market regulations......incidentally, I have also long wanted to buy a kit to modify my S3 E type headlamps to sealed SI style, but the kit costs over 5k dollars. Not as simple as removing some dummy lamps.

Although, now that you mention it, the idea may have been, in fact, to create a long swath across the back. The facelift rear blacked out light cluster was pretty much ripped of the mid 1980’s XJ41 prototype that never made it to production, so that may have been the original intent

 

Oh, the original design was absolutely designed for the UK market. I'm merely speculating that by the late 1980s, when they started designing the facelift, that the US market was actually a bigger market for Jaguar, so they went with something that would look good with US plates, UK ones be damned.

 

Designed for European market, European countries all have long plates, you can also see the chrome edge above the plate.

 

Suggestive, but I'm not convinced. That change also lines up with the edge of the real lights in the US market model in a way that doesn't look weird or forced. The abrupt cutoff of the European lights compared with the curved US lights makes them seem like the afterthought. This was also done when Ford owned Jaguar--could they have pushed for a US-centric redesign as well? I cannot find anything that talks about this in any substantial way, at least not from a quick search.

 

Ford was not at all, involved with the facelift of the car, at least aesthetically, it was already completed by the time they took over, but Jaguar did not have the resources to retool......I can’t cite the source right now, but I think its in one of my XJS books.....

 

Fair enough - that was only a guess.
Incidentally, I found this interesting article on the XJ41 prototypes....
Concepts and prototypes : Jaguar XJ41/42

 

Yes I have seen it....It’s a great article.

And it interestingly, it mentions that the rear black out tailamps in the 1984 prototype model that William Lyons reviewed:

 

Mark, I would leave them as is. Will not look good with our smaller plates if you take the ends off IMO. Will look unfinished.