Look Ma, no Retro; R Coupe Concept for Frankfurt looks to Jaguar's future.(Frankfurt Auto Show in Germany)(International Pages)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)

There are definitely no production plans for a car just like this one in Jaguar's playbook. Still, you're looking at Jaguar's future in the R Coupe Concept being unveiled Sept. 11 at the Frankfurt Auto Show in Germany. It's

perhaps the first truly modern concept car to emerge from the company since Ford took ownership more than a decade ago.

Yes, there have been concepts from Jaguar in that time frame, and interest in the likes of XK180 and the F-Type Concept was enormous, but those cars speak to Jaguar's roots as a sports car maker and borrow styling from that history. R Coupe presents a less dramatic appearance,

but a bigger step in the evolution of the company. Today, as Ford's answer to BMW and Mercedes and Audi, Lexus and Infiniti, Jaguar must be what it has been, but it's also becoming something more.

While American ears might hear ``four-seat luxury sedan'' and imagine that they see in these photos something like a Jaguar-ized Lincoln Mark IX, we are misled by cultural biases and the absence of a scale reference beyond the oversized 21-inch wheels. The R Coupe rides a 114.5-inch wheelbase, same as that of the S-Type sedan, with which it also shares the 4.0-liter V8 that couples to a rear-drive transaxle. The R Coupe is more comparable to the Mercedes CL both in size and in the relative balance between luxury and sport in its demeanor.

R Coupe is Jaguar chief designer Ian Callum and company walking the high wire of 21st century automotive design without the safety net of replicating the past with ``retro'' styling. While Sir William Lyons built the company on golden styling, the firm has mined that rich vein for so long that it risks dying of sheer self-repetition. Today's range echoes the past loudly, with the round-eyed XJ sedans owing more to Jaguars of the late 1960s than to their XJ40 antecedent, the XK striving to evoke the E-Type and the S-Type reviving themes from the late '50s and early '60s. Even the recently introduced X-Type, we're sure Callum would agree, is primarily an XJ8 writ small from the design standpoint.

``We don't want to do any more retro,'' Callum told us in late August, speaking via cell phone from atop a hill he'd just climbed on his mountain bike in a vacation spot he described only as ``off in the woods.'' Escaping the office is probably easier than fulfilling his desire to escape Jaguar's reliance on retro themes, an aim he's mentioned repeatedly in the past couple of years.