All-electric Jaguars to cost £150,000, suggests boss
As Bloke on M4 has been saying.
Back when posh cars really were different. Two things that made them expensive. Same design costs, line set up costs etc, amortised over fewer cars. But also the actual machining, alloys, components, were better/more expensive.
The Jaguar V8 – 5 litre? – engine was made in the same Ford plant as the Ford engines. But in a separate corner, where they took more care etc. And Aston had a corner of the Jaguar bit for their engines. Sorta, not really but sorta, the very best bit went into an Aston, if not good enough into a Jag, if not good enough into a Ford.
Then they put sexy body and leather seats on top, expensive car.
These days, yes, same design etc costs, amortised over low sales. But the actual car is all pretty much the same components, isn’t it (well, isn’t it?). Same electric motors, same batteries even if the pack might be a bit different etc. And all those bits are made by the same people on the same machines.
So, the buy for a Jag is the body, the design, the leather seats and what else? The brand, sure.
But the brnad was created by that difference in quality of the engineering – at least in hte beginning. Now that’s the same across all cars then what’s left?
If BYD put a sexy body and leather seats on one of thei structures then why won;t that be the same as a Jag – brand excepted?
Sure, I’m being extreme to the point of near nonsense. But how long is the brand worth much when there isn’t that underlying difference in quality any more?
I remember many years ago, before the Fermans took it over, the Chief of Bentley defending their decision to ‘buy in’ 6l Nissan engines .
His point was that in the modern world the power plant was ‘a given’ and that the owner was not really interested in what goes on under the hood ad long as it worked and the ride was comfortable.
Well Bentley were soon after gobbled up by VW, whose best effort at such a car was the lacklustre Phaeton and they needed a brand to lift it above their competitors.
Penis extension premium. And on the subject, see one of the Hammers’ enrichment seriously wrapped up a Ferrari in Epping over the weekend. Received opinion being they generally don’t need one, do they?
BYD do exactly this with their ‘luxury’/high end cars, and brand them Denza, Yangwang and Fangchengbao. Do a better job of it than I expect Jaguar will too.
It’d have to be Epping. Couldn’t be anywhere else. No doubt on his the way back to Chigwell Row. I wonder if that “Çountry Club” at Loughton is still running?
“These days, yes, same design etc costs, amortised over low sales. But the actual car is all pretty much the same components, isn’t it (well, isn’t it?). Same electric motors, same batteries even if the pack might be a bit different etc. And all those bits are made by the same people on the same machines.”
The thing is, even with ICE engines, there is no “better stuff for Jaguar”. Cars back in the past were a lot more handmade. When you paid the extra price tag for a Mercedes, you were paying for better craftsmen making it than Ford had.
Once you get robots doing a lot of the work, even the cheapest cars are excellent, because robots are better than highly skilled people and cheaper than cheap people. Better cars are about the process of car making. A team figure out how to dip instead of spray cars, because it lowers the error rate. But that then gets applied to every car, so volume is a good thing, because the per-car cost of that team is less than in a small factory.
@Zaichik, I’m pretty sure I have a vinyl gatefold by Denza, Yangwang and Fangchengbao on the shelf somewhere, weren’t they the first guys to use the Jupiter 8?
BiS @ 8.35. Fun story about Ian Wright on Top Gear. He had a Ferrari and someone asked about all the traction control and ‘driver aids’. He said there was this one time when he turned them all off. He said it was the most exciting 8 seconds of his life (ended with the car in a ditch……..).
Car parts: Indicator for a Murcialago = £181. Exactly the same indicator for a Mk1 Focus = £6.90 for a PAIR…..
https://v45.tiktokcdn-eu.com/ce685a18259c41fdece8622b238743d8/67570250/video/tos/useast2a/tos-useast2a-ve-0068c003/osgNJgJnjBCYbf2eDJUYQAQUEBk7bvYQ1RoAVv/?a=1233&bti=NDU3ZjAwOg%3D%3D&ch=0&cr=3&dr=0&lr=tiktok_m&cd=0%7C0%7C1%7C&cv=1&br=2580&bt=1290&cs=0&ds=3&ft=pfEtGMvt8Zmo0GA46b4jVYW1upWrKsd.&mime_type=video_mp4&qs=0&rc=ZTQ5NGU5ZzU6ZWY2OGlkNkBpM2c8OWY6ZnVyaDMzNzczM0BhNC41NDYuNmIxYjZjY14zYSNsamoycjRvM3JgLS1kMTZzcw%3D%3D&vvpl=1&l=20241209084402FA8DD93C1C4BFC0613AA&btag=e0008d000
Otto: « …what goes on under the hood »
Or bonnet, as we say here. The other end is where you find the boot or, in far-off lands, the dicky. It’s fun how car parts and their names vary across the globe and relate back to the horse-drawn era.
Once you get robots doing a lot of the work, even the cheapest cars are excellent, because robots are better than highly skilled people and cheaper than cheap people.
Kinda.
Still need good people to sort the robots out though and have a good design.
Look at Tesla. Lots of robots, shit build quality. Massive panel gaps, crap welds, terrible design (seems to be designed for Southern California – not enough drainage leading to build up of water and dirt in bodywork until bits fall off).
Meanwhile BYD is quite often referred to as Burn Your Driveway.
And even with electric cars, there’s a lot of potential difference between brands.
Quality of electric components. Quality of design.
Tesla decided that beta testing of cars was an unnecessary expense, so did away with that (its why their cars are shit). They may have rowed back on that, I don’t really follow them anymore – more interesting watching the collapse of the car industry in the UK.
The gap in quality has narrowed, sure, but it is still there between different manufacturers.
Where it disappears is when manufacturers get bought out. See the increase in build quality and reliability of Skoda and lamborghini after getting bought out by VW.
Jag however, seem to have shot themselves in the foot with their advertising. And if they think they’re going to sell more than a tiny handful of cars at a £150K price tag…
@TMB
There was a discussion about that on Quora. Apparently the British “boot” is derived from the boot box was fixed to back of horse-drawn coaches where boots were stored when travelling. Whereas the American “trunk” is derived from trunk, a removable storage article carried on horse-drawn coaches. Since you don’t unbolt & take the back of the car with you when entering a hotel, the Brit seems more logical.
@Addolff
When my late father was going through his Jaguar phase I can remembering noticing the instruments were straight out of the Granada.
As for Ian Wright, if he can’t drive the car without the ‘driver aids’ he really shouldn’t have been driving it. But he won’t have been the only one. The point about ‘driving aids’ is they are driving aids. They can’t do it for you. If you push the limit you’ll get past what they’re capable of rectifying & then you’re on your own. I used to enjoy the entertainment of watching people coming down a steep hill in London on a light covering of the first winter’s snow at a normal speed relying on the ABS. And ploughing straight across the junction at the bottom into the side of a passing car with their mouths doing big “O” expression. Never failed. Every winter there was snow.
Those of us who learnt on narrow crossply tyres with non-power assisted brakes & unassisted steering & manual gear shifts with baulky synchromeshes do not have these problems.
The AJ-26, later AJ-V8. Started development when Jaguar was independent, but needed Ford’s money to get it to a finished product. Was originally intended to be V6, V8 and V12 variants (hence the 26, sum of those) but the V12 was killed off because bolting a supercharger to the V8 was an all-round better solution, and the V6 was never made*
The first iteration was a 4.0 litre with a de-stroked 3.2 as a lower-volume entry-level model. It had two issues: nicosil liners — which were a brilliant invention but 5 years too soon because low-sulphur petrol didn’t become widespread until it was too late — and a plastic timing chain tensioner. The latter appears to have been a Ford insistence to save costs.
They grew to 4.2 and 3.6 litres in 2003 and gained cast-iron liners and metal timing chain tensioners. At the same time, Jaguar put their own heads on a Ford 3.0 V6 which made the 3.6 V8 redundant as the V6 made nearly the same power and the 4.2 used hardly any extra fuel. The 4.2 was also stroked to 4.4 for use in Land Rovers after Ford bought LR from BMW and wanted to get rid of the BMW V8, which was 4.4 and they didn’t want to replace it with a smaller engine…
The 5.0 came later, 2009-ish, and added direct injection. Apart from the timing chain tensioner issues with the 4.0s — many of which were updated with the kit from the 4.2 when it came out — they’ve been some of the most reliable V8s of recent years, comparable really only to Toyota’s.
Yes, they were made in a building owned by Ford, but on entirely separate lines. Aston Martin used some of the Jaguar bits made at Bridgend, but did their own work on them off-site.
To the point at hand, why a Jaguar rather than a BYD? Any volume manufacturer — and I’m including the likes of Mercedes and BMW here — build to a price. There’s stuff you don’t get in any volume-produced car because it’s too expensive either in componentry or assembly complexity. Suspension is one of these, and has traditionally been one of Jaguar’s strengths. You design the whole car around a suspension setup, you can’t put a DeDion tube in as an optional extra because it completely changes the assembly process and the packaging. Another item is length. Nothing mass-market is much more than 5m because it won’t fit in a car park, but for ultimate leg-room, a longer car might be beneficial. £150k+ cars? Their owners can send the butler to Fortnum & Mason, so they don’t need to worry about whether it’ll fit in the supermarket car park.
Building low-volume high-spec cars is a different skill-set to building mass-market. Just because BYD can knock out lots of cheap runabouts doesn’t mean it can successfully compete with anyone higher up the food-chain than, say, Mazda. Equally, Jaguar have shown that while they could make an excellent XJ and XK, their attempts at filling in the lower-cost higher-volume tiers never really worked out.
I had two 2004 XJs, and they both still had the supplying dealer invoices in their history files: £78k and £81k. Taking 20 years of inflation into account, £150k is right there. The S-Class/7-series/A8 all start at about £90k and then have extensive options lists that can double the price and some. They save a lot of development costs by being stretched, modified versions of the volume cars that sit below them, so the platform they’re on is designed to be built for something much cheaper. The same is true of the Bentley Flying Spur (£200k and up, A8) and the Rolls Royce Ghost (£250k+, 7-series). To get something that’s genuinely been designed and built from the ground up as a luxury car, you need to go to a RR Phantom, which starts at £450k…
It could still be a disaster, but success isn’t impossible. Jaguar do have a history of making cars that ride nicely while still being capable and rewarding to drive, and most of that is down to having a good engine/transmission and the suspension set up correctly. They can do this. The I-Pace is surprisingly good in both regards, if they can improve on that then it will be a much more sorted car than what the Germans offer at that price point. They need to sort out their UI, but so does every other manufacturer: provided it’s no worse than the Range Rover it’s unlikely to be a deal-breaker for anybody.
*yes, there was a V6 made after Ford sold JLR to Tata. It wasn’t a V6 block, though, it was the V8 block with the back two cylinders blanked off.
I just came across a YouTube video with a discussion about hifi equipment. The, sixty something, speaker had a relative who had a room in his home set up with high end sound equipment. Said relative was a bit put out when it was pointed out to him that this stuff is basically old junk that will end up in landfill after we die. He referred to the ever narrowing gap between the sound quality of much cheaper equipment and the really expensive stuff. This relative also mostly listened to music via his phone and a pair of cheap corded ear buds. He mentioned the ways in which younger people, and many not so young people, accessed and listened to music nowadays which don’t include bulky stuff set up in a purpose built room.
“But the brnad was created by that difference in quality of the engineering – at least in hte beginning. Now that’s the same across all cars then what’s left?”
This was exactly my point about Jaguars stable mate, Land Rover. LR brand was the rough, tough go anywhere up the jungle across the desert through the mud engineering of the original Series 1, which retained its lineage through to the Defender, Range Rover and early Discoveries. They all had the same basic engineering – ladder chassis, fully floating axles, 4wd diff locks etc. JLR took that brand and used it to plaster the name all over a series of hairdresser cars (literally, my mothers hairdresser drives an Evoke) that had none of the engineering and then cancelled the originals and made the replacements into just the same as all the other ‘offroad’ 4x4s on the market. They made a lot of money doing it for sure, as the brand took a while to die, even despite JLRs appalling quality control, but now the brand is dead. They killed it. None of the users who actually used LR products for their work have them now. Its just another ‘lifestyle’ product, and a sh*t one at that.
@Jim
That is exactly what Mike Ashley (Sports Direct) does with brands he buys. Dunlop, Carlton, Muddyfox and so on.
Strong brands a bit pricey so down on their luck. Slash the prices and quality and make a fast buck. By the time the punters realise they bought second rate its too late.
@ bis:
“If you push the limit you’ll get past what they’re capable of rectifying & then you’re on your own”
And you’ll be going a damn sight faster than you would have risked doing without all that high tech…
“The first winter’s snow at a normal speed relying on the ABS”
For some years Mercedes fitted a switch which disabled the ABS, as they (and those of us with long memories) know that locked wheels build up a ridge of snow which actually stops you quicker. Granted, that is only useful if you are travelling in a straight line, but with the sheer amount of traffic these days the opportunities to brake & steer round an obstruction on snow are becoming vanishingly small.
“Every winter there was snow. Those of us who learnt on narrow crossply tyres with non-power assisted brakes & unassisted steering & manual gear shifts with baulky synchromeshes do not have these problems”
Only had crossplies on the works Morris Minor van – my usual transport was various Minis on 145/10 radials. No 1st gear synchro on the Mk1 version, so I taught myself to double declutch. There was another (winter) advantage of such cars – the lack of soundproofing. When driving in near freezing conditions you LISTENED to the sounds coming from underneath. If the road looked wet, but the “swishing” noise from the tyres suddenly stopped, you knew instantly it had changed to ice…
When we lived in Oz: to go anywhere in the outback use a Land Rover. To get back again use a Toyota. And so it was a LandCruiser we hired for our first big trip beyond the black stump.
P.S. Belting along the dried edge of a salt lake, under a sunny blue sky, with Rossini overtures belting out of the speakers, was wonderful. Wottacountry!
Chernny,
“Still need good people to sort the robots out though and have a good design.”
Yes. But the point I’m making is that they’re a static rather than a per-car cost. There’s a team that looks after the robots doing the welding. And the costs get divided by the number of cars made. So, the cost per car falls as you increase volume. You slightly increase the number of staff if you move from 1 shift to 3, but it isn’t a tripling.
P.S. Do the learned analyses above explain why people still pay premium prices for Krautmobiles – Mercs, Beemers, Audis – even when the reliability tables say they are rubbish?
@ Stonyground
“This relative also mostly listened to music via his phone and a pair of cheap corded ear buds”
And (presumably?) pays £50 p/m for gigabit 5G internet to watch UHD films on that poxy little phone screen…
The sad bit about Landrover is that while the Chelsea tractor market was well served with cars that didn’t need the capabilities of the series 1 to Defender models at least the defender was still up to snuff (even allowing for the suspect increase in luxury appurtenances).
The new Defender is a travesty, though, and looks like a successful drug dealers car with blacked out windows and ridiculous hampster pouches. Not available with manual transmission either, unless I’m mistaken.
@Jim
The old Landies were good tools to do a job, not cars. What would would you buy to do that job now? From what I can see, some of the Jap & Yank P/Us fill that market rather better with longer & wider load beds & more comfortable cabs. And they all seem pretty bombproof. LR started putting carpets & sofas in them & turned them into impractical chariots for tossers who want to look impressive to the neighbours & down the golf club. But the tosser market has to be far bigger than the tool user market. They’ll want to buy a new one when the number plate goes stale.
I find it interesting the way different counties have different attitudes to cars. The average age of a car in this province, supposed to loaded down with millionaires, is 14 years. They seem to be like the French. The most efficient way to own car is run it until it ceases functioning. Then you replace it. Costs you a couple grand a year.
“Sure, I’m being extreme to the point of near nonsense. But how long is the brand worth much when there isn’t that underlying difference in quality any more?”
I’ve sometimes wondered how much brands carry through from youth. People who were kids and aspired to own a thing when they were great, might buy one decades later. Even if the product is kinda crap, or there are better alternatives by then.
But the people born a bit after the peak and who see other things are cool have something else imprinted on them. Like I think this explains the fall of Jaguar and also Harley-Davidson. Both were cool to kids born in the early 60s or before, but for kids born after that, they didn’t care much about motorbikes and they think a Mercedes is cooler. And those early 60s kids are retiring, being more careful with money.
Sadly, most of my favourite car brands are either gone, or wildly expensive. The Lotus Emira is gorgeous, but £80K for a sports car? I think I’m more likely to buy a Toyota GT86 for £15K.
“But the tosser market has to be far bigger than the tool user market. They’ll want to buy a new one when the number plate goes stale.”
Yes, but to keep the premium price to charge the tossers, and the brand image to lure them in, you need to keep the users on board somewhere. They are what anchors your brand to reality. Its what allows the suburban LR driver to imagine he’s fording the Zambezi with his Discovery when he goes through a small flood. Once you cut that tie the brand dies.
LR should have kept the Defender as a purely commercial vehicle, available only to commercial buyers. It could have been written off as a marketing cost, because thats what it would have been. But no, the marketing suits and accountants kill another decent brand.
“ The S-Class/7-series/A8 all start at about £90k and then have extensive options lists that can double the price and some.”
Indeed, if you go nuts with the options on the 7 series you can get within a gnat’s whisker of £250k.
Its what allows the suburban LR driver to imagine he’s fording the Zambezi with his Discovery
They are enormous fun, aren’t they? I see these shiny 4WD’s with air intakes piped up beside the windscreen. Look in them & they’ve carpets & leather upholstery.
Nothing mass-market is much more than 5m because it won’t fit in a car park
My pick up disagrees. with tow bar its about 5.4m and there’s loads of them.
Most pickups are about the same size. Though i guess it depends on your definition of ‘much’. It is too long for most parking bays, the end always sticks out.
Re. Land rover/Toyota reliability…
I think you’re all being too hard on Land Rover.
90% of Land Rovers are still on the road.
The other 10% made it back without breaking down.
😀
Went out on the green lanes the other weekend. Group of 11 of us.
Me (Ford Ranger), a Land Cruiser, 2 old discos, a disco 3, and the rest Defenders of varying level of adaptation.
By end of first day, 3 LRs had bowed out due to technical failure.
Second day had a similar failure rate.
Land Rovers are crap. Unreliable. Expensive. Unreliable. Trading on a reputation long based on a myth. Unreliable. Spares are hard to get and expensive. Insurance costs a fortune (because they get nicked for spares). Unreliable.
My truck took the same pummelling as all the Landys and just kept going. Lots of manufacturers of Pickups and other vehicles do the off-roading as well as or better than Land Rover. And most of them are more reliable. Which to me is the main thing you want. Not much fun when something fails out in the boonies.
When I was developing musical instruments with Yamaha in the 1990s they had 4 keyboard divisions: synthesisers, home organs (Electones), home pianos (Clavinovas) and home keyboards, which they called portable keyboards. Synthesisers never made money, the rest did. Home keyboards made lots.
They’d had McKinsey in who’d told them to shut down synthesisers because they made a loss. The Japs, being a bit more shrewd than that, didn’t.
They’d figured out that synthesisers and home keyboards were actually divisions of the same market. Along with the people they sponsored (Stevie Wonder, Toto, etc.) the synths were aspirational to the general public who were starting out, and a mark of quality. Thus loss-leading synths drove the large profits of home keyboards, for which they were also a source of R&D.
A network effect, much like branch lines to trunk lines before Beeching has his way.
BIS,
“I find it interesting the way different counties have different attitudes to cars. The average age of a car in this province, supposed to loaded down with millionaires, is 14 years. They seem to be like the French. The most efficient way to own car is run it until it ceases functioning. Then you replace it. Costs you a couple grand a year.”
To be fair, this is what a couple of the richest guys I know are like too. I’ve even talked to them about cars and they’ll tell you they just see their 15 year old Land Cruiser as a thing to get around, and it works, so why change it?
I don’t get the appeal of newness. Not at the price of it. I’d rather spend £300/month on almost anything else. Why would you spend £300 on that, rather than good opera seats, fine wine or whores? Or even just working less? £3600/year, you could probably have another month off work.
“A network effect, much like branch lines to trunk lines before Beeching has his way”
Apart from the crucial bit that Yamaha were actually making lots of money overall, even after their syth losses, whereas pre-Beeching BR was losing money hand over fist. The losses were well over £1bn a year (in todays money). Its no good wanting to keep the loss making bits in order to funnel trade to the more profitable sectors if you are still making overall losses. Something has got to give.
Gerry McGovern, JLR’s chief creative officer, dismissed criticism that at five metres (16 feet) long the Type 00 will be too large, saying “Britain isn’t its biggest market” and that in the US and China “it won’t appear to be massive.”
China already has a luxury car marque, called Hongqi.
Well-heeled Chinamen can also choose from Jiveturqi, or Badassmotherfuqir.
Matt
December 9, 2024 at 10:19 am
Very interesting read, thanks.
Norman; interesting.
Tho’ I notice that Korg’s WaveState/OpSix stuff is all software on Raspberry Pi.
I have a Yamaha Clavinova piano and I really like it. I just wish that I was a better pianist so that I could do the thing justice. Further to my comment about music systems, the Clavinova has a really good sound system and can be used as a Bluetooth speaker.
On the quality of car engines. The likes of Ford managed to nail building unbreakable engines and transmissions a while before they learned how to stop bodywork from rusting away. I remember my parents having a Mk3 Cortina that eventually rotted to bits. It had gone around the clock and the engine still ran perfectly and didn’t consume a drop of oil. Of course it eventually failed its MOT because there wasn’t enough metal there to weld it up.
Land Rovers are crap. Unreliable. Expensive. Unreliable. Trading on a reputation long based on a myth.
The myth was built in the days when they were a tool. A good tool for the time. All vehicles were unreliable in those days. But with a Landy, a couple of spanners, a screwdriver, a hammer & a bit of baling wire would fix nearly anything. I once inadvertently drove my Lightweight straight off an 8 ft scarp. Fortunately it was going fast enough, the rear wheels cleared the lip before the front dipped too far, there’s was a period of null-G & it landed on its wheels & bounced onwards. Didn’t worry it in the slightest.
Then they started building Range Rovers. Guaranteed to get off of the dealer’s forecourt before they rusted through.
What you call green laneing? I suspect what I used to take 2WD Mexicos down touching eighty on the straights.
P.S. Do the learned analyses above explain why people still pay premium prices for Krautmobiles – Mercs, Beemers, Audis – even when the reliability tables say they are rubbish?
Veblen goods. As the chairman of Rolex observed when asked if he felt threatened by Casio, whose watches could do everything his could and keep better time for ~1% of the price, he observed: “I’m not in the watch business; I’m in the luxury business.”
locked wheels build up a ridge of snow which actually stops you quicker.
There was a trick I learned from driving on snow in those sort of conditions. With the steering wheel, whack the front wheels into full lock one way of the other. The car slides straight on but the front wheels are now virtually sideways on & plough a much wider furrow, so slowing you quicker. It’s got to be full lock though. Too little & the car may follow the wheels. Now it’s down to digging it out. I don’t know if you can do that with front wheel drive though. Most of them don’t seem to have enough lock.
There’s something that struck me recently about people’s driving abilities lately. And that was listening to some geezer on UK TV whining on about the damage to his car done by a pothole. Film of road with numerous potholes & cars splashing through them. And my immediate thought was WTF did you drive into a pothole at a speed would damage the car?
I think the UK went through a period when its roads were actually quite good. When I started driving, particularly out in the country lanes, there were potholes you could lose entire cars in. One just got accustomed to thinking pothole! Avoid it! Or if you couldn’t avoid it, slow to a crawl & very carefully negotiate it. You don’t know how deep that puddle is. One would would drive, always on the lookout for potholes, deep puddles, bad bits of road, things in the road… Now people seem to expect to travel at the same speeds whatever. Same thing with snow, ice & heavy rain.
What you call green laneing? I suspect what I used to take 2WD Mexicos down touching eighty on the straights.
Search for Strata Florida on YouTube.
Is a good example of it.
Some bits aren’t too bad, but majority need a good clearance and quite a lot needs 4wd w/ lockers.
I don’t think anyone is doing 80 on Florida…
( been out all day. Just catching up )
TMB
‘under the hood’ sounds a bit more Steve McQueen when talking performance morors. ‘Under the bonnet’ sounds like a Vauxhall Cavalier.
Same applies to ‘trunk’ vs ‘ boot’ .
I mean you wouldn’t say to your homie ‘Do you want to see the dead hooker in my boot ?’
Now would you ?
Land Rovers : the true sign of proper utility is looking at what jihadis use to carry their RPGs and 50cals across the desert. They aint driving Evoques are they ?
Jerry vs Jap : it was explained to me once that German cars are designed to be used exactly as specified. Deviate from the instructoons and the vehicle is toast. Japanese cars are built with a lot more tolerance.
i don’t trust German cars.
Had a couple of people at work where their car has nearly killed them. (Both got rid sharpish)
1. Pulling out for an over take, almost passed and a car appears coming other way. Nothing major but needed to speed up, hit the go-baby-go pedal and it goes into limp mode creating a dangerous situation.
2. Pulling across a dual carriageway to turn right. Accelerated across, found themselves in the right hand lane as car went into limp mode.
Both cases it’s after a sudden increase in throttle. Apparently it’s to “protect the engine from damage”
Fuck the engine. I don’t want to get killed. Bring up a warning light. Don’t suddenly take power away!
Nope. Not for me.
I owned a Jag until recently
A 2 Litre diesel XE from new. Reliable, comfortable and economical. Absolutely ideal for motorway cruising, I would usually get 55mpg. Nothing went wrong with it in 7 years
Servicing was pricey and our local dealer pretty useless ( I didn’t buy it from them)
So I am the target market for a replacement.
£150k EV? No thanks
Spending £150k on an electric car is mental. They all drive pretty much the same so you’re paying an extra £100K or so for a bit of trim and a badge.
I think people will find other vulgar displays of wealth, perhaps by turning the heating on in winter.
EVs conjur up for me the Father Ted episode with the homicidal milkman
My apologies CD. Green laneing’s a Brit thing. People in shiny 4WD’s getting bogged in stages we regarded as the easy ones. Never had much problems with ground clearance. Overhead clearance maybe. Taking off on bumps & getting the branch of a tree in the windscreen. Often at night.
“I think the UK went through a period when its roads were actually quite good.”
Sorta, and yes, a lot of the lanes were definitely a bit iffy, but I think this is two things; one being the anticipated lifetime of the surface, t’other being a change in the repair method.
So, the gas board dig up the road, fill the hole in, and lay new tarmac. What used to happen was that the edges of the repair were sealed with tar. You used to be able to smell the stuff bubbling away in a tank on the back of the dropside from miles away.
And at some point, they stopped doing that seal. So the repair lasted about six, nine months tops.
The other thing was top-dressing the surface. Started in the ’70s? But fell away as a technique about 20 years ago?
But from somewhere around (pick a year) ’85, through to mid/late ’90s, a lot of roads got planed and re-surfaced properly.
And the expected lifetime of that would be about 30 years.
So by now, a fair number of surfaces are end of life, but it’s a lot worse due to no repairs being sealed at the edges.
What’s odd is that over the last couple of years, the sealing has come back (looks like some sort of tape) as has top dressing.
Otto: « ‘Under the bonnet’ sounds like a Vauxhall Cavalier.. »
Well that’s me sussed.
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Do you mind? I’m not having anything like that in the boot of my Cavalier!
Potholes and other road imperfections are a much greater problem with low ratio sidewalls on tyres now. Most new cars seem to be sold with tyres that look as though they’re off a track car, ostensibly for better handling, the limits of which most people will never get anywhere near on public roads. They’re wholly unnecessary, as are the huge alloy wheels that now seem all the rage.
They’re a stylist’s vanity that are very vulnerable to pothole damage, whereas older cars with more balloon-like tyres, such as those fitted to my old CRV are far less prone and ride over grotty roads more or less regardless.
Build quality, thanks mainly to disposing of highly unionised work forces and replacing them with robots is infinitely better on present day cars, but the vastly increased complexity of electronics and mechanical fittings like engines//gearboxes/suspension etc appear to make them less reliable. The main German makes, in spite of a higher perceived quality, are notoriously poor in this respect.
That’s why these brands become ‘lifestyle brands’. Harley Davidson, Triumph Motorcycles, now Jaguar.
You don’t buy a H-D because its a great bike in its class, etc, (there are other American brands that do as well or better for similar price and the J-4 do better for lower cost) you buy it because you’re the sort of person who wants people think you’re the sort of person you see in an H-D commercial.
Hence JaGUar.
The question is, do the sort of people who want to be androgynous wierdos but are too afraid to do so have enough money to drop 150k on a glorified Ford?
Not sure what Triumph would be considered a lifestyle brand. They’re making some good machines that get good reviews. My Tiger 900 is terrific.