More On Cars

Here are three Jaguars - I got these images after searching for Jaguar XJ on Google Images. The first one is from a few decades ago, the second one is relatively new and the final one’s pretty recent. All are XJs.

Now, the latest one is much more aerodynamic than its predecessors. The second one itself is more sleek than the first one. My question is this - the people who designed the earliest car must have known it was not the most aerodynamic shape for a car. Aerodynamics must have been well understood by then - it’s not as if a breakthrough in physics in the intervening years led to people realising that the new shapes was more sleek. No, the people at Jaguar must have known all along that the second shape was a closer approximation of what they were aiming at and the third one even more so. So why did they not go with the latest shape from the start !?! I realise that aesthetics are not always guided completely by aerodynamics - look at Lamborghinis for instance - but nevertheless, they do play a big part. And for a given underlying “core shape” of a car, the engineering must be trying to make it as aerodynamic as possible. So why were the older versions of the same car model not as sleek and slippery as newer ones !?! Were there manufacturing challenges involved !?!