Duel: Silver Shadow V Jaguar MkX

Jaguar’s wide boy and Rolls-Royce’s most modern car for decades were once both vying for the title of best car in the world. How do they compare today?

Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow

Andrew Everett

Contributor

Touting it at the time as ‘the best car in the world’ was a brave statement to make, but the 1965 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow was certainly up to the task. Sweeping away the slightly pompous, upright Silver Cloud – parodied by CAR as the ‘Rolls Canardly’ – the Silver Shadow was a magnificent bit of kit for its time and a fresh new direction for the Crewe firm.

The Shadow was pretty much all new and featured Crewe’s first unitary steel bodyshell as well as powered self-levelling suspension and dual circuit brakes, the design of which was licensed from Citroën, discs all round and a lightly revised version of the superlative all alloy V8. Competition from Europe was minimal; Not the 300SEL Mercedes and certainly not an upstart like the Jaguar MkX. The Mercedes had quality on its side at least; these were the days when Benz quality was still close to that of the hand finished Rolls and the big Coupes were virtually works of art. The MkX was a good car but it was too wide and had both BMC levels of quality and even with the 4.2 engine, didn’t quite have the staying power for serious motorway speeds unless it had the four-speed manual box with overdrive. No, the only cars that could really compete with the Shadow came from America: the Lincoln Continental was one and arguably the 1966 Cadillac. But they were both still mass produced cars and neither had the quality off the Rolls in the detail.