By: Dave Abrahams
Pretoria - From the second half of 2016 Jaguar Land Rover South Africa will offer the full range of Special Vehicle Operations models.
SVO, of course, is Jaguar Land Rover's bespoke division, home of hand-built cars with extra luxury, extra performance, extra exclusivity - or a combination of all three! - for wealthy customers who know what they want.
Jaguar Land Rover's new bespoke shop
Already available in South Africa are the Range Rover Sport SVR and Range Rover SV Autobiography.
The Range Rover Sport SVR's five-litre supercharged V8 makes it the fastest and most powerful Land Rover ever built - and to see a two-and-a-half-ton bigfoot shaped like a block of flats accelerating from a standing start to 100km/gh in 4.7 seconds must be one of the most intimidating sights on the road; check out the lead picture in our gallery to see what we mean.
By contrast, the SV Autobiography takes luxury off-roading to the next level with 24-way electrically adjustable seats upholstered in butter-soft specially tanned leather, deep pile mohair carpets, a 1700 watt Meridian sound system and champagne chiller complete with two champagne flutes - see the interior picture in our gallery.
And yet neither of these models has had to sacrifice any of its off-road ability.
EXCLUSIVE
Nowhere near as comfortable but infinitely more exclusive is the limited-production Jaguar F-Type Project 7 sports-car - the blue roadster in our gallery. Just five of these hand-built supercars have been allocated to South African customers - and there will not be another batch.
That's because they'll be followed in August by Jaguar's fastest street-legal coupé yet - the F-Type SVR. Motorvated by a supercharged five-litre V8 rated at 423kW and 700Nm driving all four wheels, it speaks with the voice of authority through an Inconel titanium exhaust system and the maker says it's good for 320km/h flat out. It’s featured in gold in our gallery.
JAGUAR HERITAGE
But that's not all the Jaguar skunk works is good for; it's also responsible for the Heritage programme, sourcing and providing parts for classic Jaguars and Land Rovers.
When you consider that three out of every four Series and Defender models built since 1948 are still running, somewhere in the world, and the prices currently being realised for E-Types and XK models make it viable to restore basket cases that would previously have been regarded as unsalvageable, that's a huge undertaking.
And the Special Vehicle Operations crew recently took the Heritage programme a huge step further.
In 1962 Jaguar's competition department set aside 18 chassis numbers for a batch of aluminium-bodied racing E-Types. In the end only 12 were made, so in 2014 SVO announced that it would complete the series by hand-building the remaining six cars, to exactly the same specifications as the originals, at a cool £1 million (R22.2 million) each.