The Tata deal is go
Discussion
scruffy said:
Serves them right for selling it to Ford...
The alternative was GM buying Jag back then. Do you think they'd have been better for Jaguar than Ford were? All Jaguars could have ended up being built on an increasingly stretched Cavalier platform.Ford haven't been perfect, but they have given Jaguar a lot of rope and a hell of cash. Ford have improved the quality at Jaguar enormously. Trying driving a pre-Ford XJS and a Ford owned Jaguar XJS.
The big problem was that Ford ran out of cash to shower over Jaguar before they finished solving the problems. Ford were also not brave enough. The S-Type and the X-Type were too conservative at introduction. The previous XJ was just too loved, no wanted the styling buggered about with, so X350 ended up too conservative too. But they would have been panned if they'd tried to go in a new direction straight from X308, doing that would have needed extreme braveness - not a well know characteristic of big publicly owned companies.
Fingers crossed Tata will in the position to let Jaguar thrive. I hope they've arrived in time to reap the reward for all of Ford's investment.
I think it's possible to appeal to traditional Jaguar customer and people who want the latest and greatest thing. I love my XJ (and my XK 
) but my view of a Jaguar is that it should be svelte, perhaps modern safety legislation is our biggest enemy hear. You can't have protruding bumpers, which steals one of the traditional ways of breaking up the front of the car. You can't have the low slung bonnet, there has to be a certain safety margin between the bonnet and the top of the engine or anything hard.
I don't think it would be impossible to design a car that was both obviously an XJ and also looked very modern. There was a time when the XJ was just that car.
I think that Jaguar needs to separate itself from the other manufactures in an increasingly full and competitive market place. They need not to try and make Jaguar's a knock-off of a BMW. The newer MBs I've driven seem to have stopped being Mercs, at least they don't feel to me like them, they have changed their suspension tuning to be Beamerish, well surely not everyone want a car that feels like a BMW, I prefer the way my XJ rides, I prefer the way it corners. To my mind it does both things better, and that's also part of being a Jaguar. I remember a review of the X300 against the then current 5 and E-class, where they were comparing the bump absorption and the Jaguar drivers was say what bumps on that road?
We are never going to see a return to the situation in the fifties and early sixties where you could but a Jaguar for a small fraction of the price of a basic BMW or MB. Those economics just won't work now, half of Jaguar's problems are probably that they didn't work then either.
Fingers crossed that they'll find a viable way forward.
And fingers crossed that they can stay being Jaguars.
) but my view of a Jaguar is that it should be svelte, perhaps modern safety legislation is our biggest enemy hear. You can't have protruding bumpers, which steals one of the traditional ways of breaking up the front of the car. You can't have the low slung bonnet, there has to be a certain safety margin between the bonnet and the top of the engine or anything hard. I don't think it would be impossible to design a car that was both obviously an XJ and also looked very modern. There was a time when the XJ was just that car.
I think that Jaguar needs to separate itself from the other manufactures in an increasingly full and competitive market place. They need not to try and make Jaguar's a knock-off of a BMW. The newer MBs I've driven seem to have stopped being Mercs, at least they don't feel to me like them, they have changed their suspension tuning to be Beamerish, well surely not everyone want a car that feels like a BMW, I prefer the way my XJ rides, I prefer the way it corners. To my mind it does both things better, and that's also part of being a Jaguar. I remember a review of the X300 against the then current 5 and E-class, where they were comparing the bump absorption and the Jaguar drivers was say what bumps on that road?
We are never going to see a return to the situation in the fifties and early sixties where you could but a Jaguar for a small fraction of the price of a basic BMW or MB. Those economics just won't work now, half of Jaguar's problems are probably that they didn't work then either.
Fingers crossed that they'll find a viable way forward.
And fingers crossed that they can stay being Jaguars.
Gassing Station | Jaguar | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff