And a good thing, too. That heritage has helped sustain Jaguar over some tough times. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that during the years preceding Ford's 1989 buyout, Jaguar was a severely endangered species. Antiquated factory tooling and poor quality control created big durability and reliability image problems. Limited capital held back new product development. Without some outside help, Jaguar would certainly have joined the long, long list of companies that were - but are no more.

We're happy to report that Jaguar's dark ages seem to be coming to an end. Ford cash, quality control techniques and electronic know-how have produced steady improvements in existing Jaguars, something that proved to be a much bigger undertaking than anticipated.

And now, at last, the renaissance has advanced to a new car, the XJ Series sedan. It's not quite all-new, as with the Oldsmobile Aurora, but it's attractively restyled and sweepingly re-engineered.

The XJ Series sedans have been expanded to four models for 1995: the basic XJ6, the Vanden Plas, the 12-cylinder XJ12 and our test car, the formidable XJR.