Jaguar - an ‘old mans’ car?

Jaguar - an ‘old mans’ car?

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Discussion

craigjm

17,907 posts

199 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
Jaguar Steve said:
Jaguar have gone from making the cars Jaguar want to make to making the cars customers want them to make.
What complete nonsense. Do you think ANY business is sitting there making things because they think wow we love them and not giving a st if they sell of not? Do you also think that the whole company is sitting there now thinking oh my god the cars we are designing now are awful and I have to do it because its what the customer wants?

Come on get real. Lets rewind the clock. The XJ40 was supposed to replace the series 2 XJ so in reality they didnt want to build the hastily restyled series 3 and it wouldnt have existed if they could have got the 40 out when they should. By the time it was out did they want to sell it? did they want to keep the XJS on sale for over 20 years? no chance it was all necessity because of the position they were in at the time. They most certainly didnt want to build the X-type but were ordered to do it.

If we go further back I am sure we can find examples of cars that old Willy Lyons wasnt extsatic about but he had to go with it at the time due to his budget constraints etc.

Business is business and it has to be profitable and give the people what they want. There appears to be a strange romanticism attached to nostalgia around Jaguar that doesnt impact on any other car company in quite the same way. You dont hear BMW owers pining for a Neu Classe or Mercedes owners pining for a W111 whilst decrying the current models. Maybe its because William Lyons was so closly associated with his company more than the owners of the Germans etc but time moves on, style and technology moves on and if he was alive today he would be moving with it excited by the possibility of an electric car and autonomous technology. He was a visionary not a traditionalist so to tie his legacy to wood and leather and old fashioned looks is doing the man a dis-service.

lukeharding

2,928 posts

88 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
Raygun said:
I thought old blokes drive silver Mercs?
I thought it was champagne coloured ones that formed that image. Thinking of it there aren't a lot of cars I haven't seen old people driving though

liner33

10,640 posts

201 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
Mercedes have been doing the same for years, the best selling Mercedes is a A Class , competition for the Audi A3, BMW 1 and Golf all of which are better.

Premium car makers making sub par cars all it does is weaken the brand

craigjm

17,907 posts

199 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
liner33 said:
Mercedes have been doing the same for years, the best selling Mercedes is a A Class , competition for the Audi A3, BMW 1 and Golf all of which are better.

Premium car makers making sub par cars all it does is weaken the brand
The A class alone sells more cars that the whole of Jaguars output

anonymous-user

53 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
craigjm said:
The A class alone sells more cars that the whole of Jaguars output
Yep a few too many to be of interest but I said that about Mk3 Cortina's in the 70s and they have come back with lots of interest.

Patrick Bateman

12,143 posts

173 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
F-type an old man's car? That's a new one to me. Only ever heard positive things.

liner33

10,640 posts

201 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
craigjm said:
The A class alone sells more cars that the whole of Jaguars output
Indeed , some premium manufacturer eh?

Jaguar steve

9,232 posts

209 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
craigjm said:
Jaguar Steve said:
Jaguar have gone from making the cars Jaguar want to make to making the cars customers want them to make.
What complete nonsense. Do you think ANY business is sitting there making things because they think wow we love them and not giving a st if they sell of not? Do you also think that the whole company is sitting there now thinking oh my god the cars we are designing now are awful and I have to do it because its what the customer wants?

Come on get real. Lets rewind the clock. The XJ40 was supposed to replace the series 2 XJ so in reality they didnt want to build the hastily restyled series 3 and it wouldnt have existed if they could have got the 40 out when they should. By the time it was out did they want to sell it? did they want to keep the XJS on sale for over 20 years? no chance it was all necessity because of the position they were in at the time. They most certainly didnt want to build the X-type but were ordered to do it.

If we go further back I am sure we can find examples of cars that old Willy Lyons wasnt extsatic about but he had to go with it at the time due to his budget constraints etc.

Business is business and it has to be profitable and give the people what they want. There appears to be a strange romanticism attached to nostalgia around Jaguar that doesnt impact on any other car company in quite the same way. You dont hear BMW owers pining for a Neu Classe or Mercedes owners pining for a W111 whilst decrying the current models. Maybe its because William Lyons was so closly associated with his company more than the owners of the Germans etc but time moves on, style and technology moves on and if he was alive today he would be moving with it excited by the possibility of an electric car and autonomous technology. He was a visionary not a traditionalist so to tie his legacy to wood and leather and old fashioned looks is doing the man a dis-service.
Nobody with more than two functioning brain cells would think that for a moment. Yes, business is business. Perhaps I should have said instead Jaguar were building the cars they could instead of saying building the cars they wanted. And you'll know as well as I do pretty much everything that left the factory up to the later XJ40 years was pretty - lets be polite, err variable - in build quality, so much so that during the BL years even junior managers were given XJs as company cars because nobody else wanted them.

Ford investment saved the company and Tata has turned it around. That's a good thing of course and something to be happy about , even if the current line up of cars doesn't appeal to everybody.

craigjm

17,907 posts

199 months

Friday 16th February 2018
quotequote all
Jaguar steve said:
Ford investment saved the company and Tata has turned it around. That's a good thing of course and something to be happy about , even if the current line up of cars doesn't appeal to everybody.
Indeed