Junkyard Find: 1987 Jaguar XJ6

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Jaguar built the Series III Jaguar XJ for the 1979 through 1992 model years, and so I’ve been seeing these cars in the big self-service vehicle graveyards since, well, the middle 1980s. They still show up in such yards to this day, as long-neglected project cars get swept up in yard- and driveway-clearance projects, but I’ll only document those that are particularly interesting.

A very clean British Racing Green XJ6 from the last model year for the Series III’s straight-six engine certainly qualifies, so here we go!

As we can see from the tags on the sliced-off California license plate (I found this car in a San Francisco Bay Area yard), Barry’s ’87 Jag was a driver not so long ago. My first guess for the junkyardization of Barry’s Jag is that something expensive failed in the electrical system and Barry decided to cut his losses. My second guess: Barry couldn’t get the car to pass California’s draconian emissions testing (probably due to the aforementioned electrical system causing some sensor or solenoid to behave erratically) and he decided to cut his losses. Third guess is just an accumulation of unpaid parking tickets and the visit from a tow truck not summoned by Barry.

You could still buy a Series III XJ after the 1987 model year, but only with a V12 engine. Jaguar put plenty of sixes in the subsequent XJs, of course.

This interior is damn near perfect, aside from a bit of lacquer cracking on the wood paneling. I hope some Bay Area XJ owner grabbed the seats and door panels out of this car prior to its date with the cold steel jaws of The Crusher.

Not many miles on it. Barry really babied his ’87.

Great deals on used Jags!

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Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • Peeryog Peeryog on Jan 27, 2020

    This is a piker's car. If you really wanted understated class, you bought a Rover P5B

  • ToolGuy ToolGuy on Jan 28, 2020

    Grab this now and set it aside for an EV conversion several years from now.

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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