Welcome at Jaguar World Magazine April 2023 Issue

I got into a rabbit-hole discussion with a colleague recently surrounding the slightly off-topic subject of Rover’s ill-fated Project Drive costcutting initiative – something best illustrated by holding the woefully thin carpet of a late MG TF up to the sunlight. This was of course in complete contrast to the usual process of a car’s life cycle where incremental improvements generally mean the last of the line is technically the best – and explains why the classic car market so often prizes either the first or last examples of a given model.
A photo shoot on an X-Type (see page 42) the following day illustrated this nicely, the car in question being one of the very last batch to leave the Halewood line, by which time the detail fit and finish had improved noticeably over the early example I ran a couple of years ago, to the point where they could almost be different cars entirely. Certainly the X-Type haters out there – most of whom have never darkened the door handle of one in real life – would do well to sample the late-model diesel and perhaps compare it to an ‘E90’ BMW320d of the same age and mileage which was never the Bavarians’ finest hour.
I’d used our XJ8 to attend the photo shoot and having not driven it for a while it was good to see that it was as refined a way to travel as the brand new EV I’ve been diving recently as well as being a whole lot more convenient to fuel up…. in theory.
In practice I got pretty much what I deserved after leaving the car unused in the cold weather and discovering that I did indeed need to connect it to mains power after all. And so we come to this month’s point: old cars hate sitting still almost as much as they hate salty roads, so get out and drive your Jaguar if you want it to work next time you need it.

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NitroFlare

• Lancashire Life – April 2023
• Kent Life – March 2023