yeah, not typical, but some things take advantage of that.

For example, In Spring, you configure instances of (typically Singleton) objects in an XML file stating the type and the Spring container uses that to instantiate them.

like:
<bean id="myCar" type="com.autos.Car" />

basically behind the scenes its doing:

Class myCarClass = new Class("com.autos.Car");
Object myCar = myCarClass.getInstance();

(or something similar, I can't remember exact syntax)