Jaguar C-X17 prototype first drive

From the driver's seat you look over the Jaguar C-X17’s lumpy bonnet, rather than down it as usual, yet this car could only be a Jaguar.

It may offer a different view of the road from that of any other Jaguar ever built, but there's enough evidence in those shapes over which you're seeing the road to remove the need for any kind of label. 

The middle of the bonnet has a reassuring power bulge, not identical to any other Jaguar's but strongly related. At either side, two gentle curves gracefully intersect at the car's frontal extremity, one pair gliding across the top of each headlight, the other describing the muscle that runs above each front wheel. 

This is the latest iteration of C-X17, the concept version of the all-wheel-drive "sports crossover" Jaguar will surely launch in two or three years' time off the enormously expensive all-aluminium architecture in which it is pouring every earned pound - and then some - to build a viable future among the world's premium car manufacturers.

When I ask whether the new aluminium structure lurks beneath the elegant skin of this particular prototype, engineer Graham Wilkins, vehicle engineering manager for the cars that will use this new architecture tell me it is not much more than an engineering lash-up. "It has a supercharged XK engine," he says, "and it has four-wheel drive. It's not the real thing, but more of a bespoke experiment. What's important is it proves the car can look that good, yet all the new stuff would fit under there. That's as important as having it in place."

Jaguar high-ups have been in two minds about how to treat the C-X17 ever since it first broke cover with a mighty fanfare two months ago. For some it's a way of showing that the Jaguar F-Type's design style can extend to one automotive extremity - sports cars - to the other, SUVs, while encompassing saloons and estates on the day. Ergo, Jaguar can build whatever cars its R&D department believes the market will take.

Others feel this concentration on design style obscures the significance of the wholesale change to aluminium, a programme costing many millions that will effect every Jaguar ever made from now on. It is becoming apparent that this is not merely a compact architecture Jaguar is building but the basis of its entire future range - looking ahead for two decades and more.

Gingerly we climb into the car. First thing you see through the cabin door are the elegantly simple seats in saddle leather, reminiscent of those from the original E-type, whose beauty and simplicity has stayed with us for 50 years. 

There is brightwork, but the effect is simplicity: a generously proportioned pair of round dials ahead, a high centre console running right through the car which, fascinatingly, can turn itself into a screen, a louvred light shade above that plays patterns on the lower interior, and a simple raked fascia with a metal trim-piece at its trailing edge, with JAGUAR embossed above the console. 

The essential "volumes" of the interior are as they might be in production, says Jaguar advanced design chief Julian Thomson, who is proud of what his team achieved, but the colour and trim are, in essence, experiments.

The car may look slick, but the crudity of its under-bits become instantly into focus as we begin to roll. Prototypes are usually like that. Before we go, an engineer lurking in the rear selects Drive with a tommy-bar mysteriously inserted in a hole in the console.