RE: Paris 2012: F-Type, full details

RE: Paris 2012: F-Type, full details

Author
Discussion

J-P

4,350 posts

205 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
anonymous said:
[redacted]
They'll definitely shift a few - it looks great and sounds awesome!

Twincam16

27,646 posts

257 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
LuS1fer said:
I may have been faintly aware of it at the time but if so, it is long forgotten. I recall the 50s Le Mans win when cars were interesting and bore some relation to road cars.

Unfortunately, the romance with Le Mans seems to me to be very much confined to PH and people who go there. Nobody else I know, even those interested in cars, pay any attention to it. In the 50s it has a real PH factor but now it's just a boring endurance race. Not even Corvettes can get me interested. I fear the same will apply to most Jag buyers.

"Can I interest you in a Jaguar?"
"No"
"They've recently won Le Mans in a car totally unrelated to this car, you know"
"Oh that's the clincher then".

"Can I interest you in a Citroen C4?"
"No"
"They won lots of Paris-Dakar rallies"
"So?"

I'm not being obtuse nor trolling but I just don't see it makes any difference these days. I doubt BMW achieve their sales on the back of motorsport either.
Oh come on - you know it's not as heavy-handed as that.

Take this bestseller, for example:



Costs a bit more than the standard Fabia, and logic suggests that the average Fabia customer won't be interested in a beefier-looking exhaust, rally car design cues and cool-looking badges. 'What's the point', 'it'll never sell', 'who'd want that?' etc.

But if someone goes into a showroom and sees one, costing a few quid more than a standard model, next to a big picture of this:



And it'll make them feel a lot better about buying the Montecarlo edition rather than the standard one, because it's cool.

Now, put that on a bigger scale. You fancy a sports car and it's either a BMW Z4M Coupe, a Porsche 911, or this.

BMW has images of this in its showroom:



Porsche has this:



And Jaguar will have some lifestyle tosh with some dreamily 'aspirational' people posing with it, that you'll be expected to want to be.

Which do you think will sell better? I suspect the former, because motor sport has sold cars since the dawn of time. 'Win on Sunday, sell on Monday' - forget it at your peril, especially when a car is meant to be sporty.

Actually, going back to that Skoda, it adds legitimacy to the higher price. It makes buyers think 'well, clearly motorsport development has gone into that car, so I'm paying for the latest technology'. They'll pay for that more readily than they'll pay for some tarted-up racer-wannabe top-of-the-range econobox with a big lairy spoiler and stripes, because if it's still an econobox at heart, the whole point of it will be to buy it as cheaply as possible. Entering motor sport and doing well means people will think (and sometimes they'll be right) that your product is better-engineered than rivals who don't.

LuS1fer

41,080 posts

244 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
I couldn't diagree more. the Skoda looks nothing like the showroom car and has zero bearing on my desire for a "hot hatch". It was different in the 60s when the performance car was evolving but nowadays, we've pretty much reached a plateau.

The Z4 would have no influence at all to most women buying one because they want a wafty convertible with an electric roof. that image might well alienate them into thinking it's a car designed with a really hard ride suitable for tracks rather than the road.

Same with the 911. If I want a car to show I've "arrived", all I need is a 911 and odds on it won't be a GT3 or a GT2, it'll be a standard 911 without any garish motorsport stickers that went deeply out of fashion a long time ago.

The link these days is more a retro link with "racing stripes" but that's because they macho up otherwise less interesting designs or hark back to a previous era.

On your logic, the Megane R26R would have sold on the back of motorpsort hardcore origins and it didn't.

All the performance derivatives I have ever bought have been based on simple road tests proving they were great ROAD cars. 99% of Ford Escort Mk 1 and IIs were bought for practical economy reasons and not because they were rallied. they made a small number of RS1600s to cater for those people and the RS1800 was very much special order leaving the visually different RS2000 to appeal to the buyers.

Winning races doesn't hurt of course. It boosts the reputation of the manufacturer but if they already have a successful history, undermining it by racing against far more competent competition in what is really a rich man's self-indulgent sport is not attractive and for me, I would be wondering how much cheaper the car could be if they stopped splashing money out.

There is plainly truth in this from the number of manufacturesrs who have given up motorsport as an expensive frill with little relevance to sales.

zebedee

4,589 posts

277 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
LuS1fer said:
I couldn't diagree more. the Skoda looks nothing like the showroom car and has zero bearing on my desire for a "hot hatch". It was different in the 60s when the performance car was evolving but nowadays, we've pretty much reached a plateau.

The Z4 would have no influence at all to most women buying one because they want a wafty convertible with an electric roof. that image might well alienate them into thinking it's a car designed with a really hard ride suitable for tracks rather than the road.

Same with the 911. If I want a car to show I've "arrived", all I need is a 911 and odds on it won't be a GT3 or a GT2, it'll be a standard 911 without any garish motorsport stickers that went deeply out of fashion a long time ago.

The link these days is more a retro link with "racing stripes" but that's because they macho up otherwise less interesting designs or hark back to a previous era.

On your logic, the Megane R26R would have sold on the back of motorpsort hardcore origins and it didn't.

All the performance derivatives I have ever bought have been based on simple road tests proving they were great ROAD cars. 99% of Ford Escort Mk 1 and IIs were bought for practical economy reasons and not because they were rallied. they made a small number of RS1600s to cater for those people and the RS1800 was very much special order leaving the visually different RS2000 to appeal to the buyers.

Winning races doesn't hurt of course. It boosts the reputation of the manufacturer but if they already have a successful history, undermining it by racing against far more competent competition in what is really a rich man's self-indulgent sport is not attractive and for me, I would be wondering how much cheaper the car could be if they stopped splashing money out.

There is plainly truth in this from the number of manufacturesrs who have given up motorsport as an expensive frill with little relevance to sales.
Thank god that there are people in car companies that don't think like you. Le Mans boring? Yeah, right!

LuS1fer

41,080 posts

244 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
zebedee said:
Thank god that there are people in car companies that don't think like you. Le Mans boring? Yeah, right!
So is F1 and golf... to me.
Finding Le Mans boring and road cars interesting is not an unusual combination. Don't get me wrong, if I was placed at the cicuit, i would watch it but not with any great compulsion as 24 hours is a long time.
Neither would I not buy a sporty car because the manufacturer had not competed in Le Mans.

I couldn't even tell you who won the Wales Rally last year and I went to watch the finish with my son. I recall seeing a load of hatches that all seemed to be Fiestas and possibly hatches from other manufacturers too but none of it would affect my choice of road car because they are IRRELEVANT unless they are standard road cars and I fancied doing some rallying. Am I wrong?

tony wright

1,004 posts

249 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
Sorry to digress from the way the thread was going, but what do people think are the essential must have options for the F Type?

Guvernator

13,103 posts

164 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
tony wright said:
Sorry to digress from the way the thread was going, but what do people think are the essential must have options for the F Type?
200kgs less weight and a manual gearbox it seems like biggrin

LuS1fer

41,080 posts

244 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
L'Oreal Perma-Blonde hair dye? wink (Male or female...)

zebedee

4,589 posts

277 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
LuS1fer said:
L'Oreal Perma-Blonde hair dye? wink (Male or female...)
why? This car appears 'proper' to me.

LuS1fer

41,080 posts

244 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
zebedee said:
why? This car appears 'proper' to me.
And to me but you can't control who will buy it and I see a lot of MD's and banker's wives (and indeed professional women in their own right, he hastily added) in one as an alternative to top end BMW convertibles and Mercedes perhaps. Only time will tell.

We need to devise a driving test so only pukka drivers can buy one. wink

zebedee

4,589 posts

277 months

Wednesday 3rd October 2012
quotequote all
LuS1fer said:
And to me but you can't control who will buy it and I see a lot of MD's and banker's wives (and indeed professional women in their own right, he hastily added) in one as an alternative to top end BMW convertibles and Mercedes perhaps. Only time will tell.

We need to devise a driving test so only pukka drivers can buy one. wink
I'm all for lots of people buying them and giving Jag the funds it needs to a) go back to Le Mans (admittedly for you not to watch!) and b) build an even more proper R-S that needs a special licence to drive and has to be sent back to the dealers if not regularly recording high g-loading...