Jaguar S-Type 3.0 V6 | Shed of the Week
Still not convinced by Jaguar's downsized saloon? Shed reckons he's cracked the code...
What ever did we do before we had the internet? It’s hard to imagine or even remember what life was like in those days, when the vast majority of us relied on bent newspapers or carefully curated telly for our ‘information’, the only exceptions to the generally sheeplike acceptance of supposed truths being exhibited by those few boffins and swots who used to read books and such like.
Point being, before the internet it was jolly difficult to mount a convincing campaign against a manufacturer who had committed misdeeds because a) it was really hard to find others who had suffered like you, and b) social media didn’t exist as a ready-made platform from which to launch your attack.
Pre-internet, all that anyone with a grievance could do was catch their death of cold marching up and down outside their local dealership with a sandwich board, or, if they were massively rich, pay lawyers to do the marching. Neither approach gave any guarantee of success. What a difference between then and now, when powerful action is free of charge and any half-decent social media campaign will pretty much run itself once you’ve kickstarted it into life. What a time to be alive.
The other massive bonus of the internet is all the lovely free information it supplies. Admittedly that info is not always correct, so you do have to be a bit careful, but a few seconds cross-checking will usually confirm or deny any statement you read. Even Shed goes in for this modern online research stuff on account of how if’s made him a fair few quid over the years. How? By telling him about easy fixes to expensive sounding problems.
Take this week’s shed, a Jaguar S-Type 3.0 in what appears to be absolutely mint condish. 92,000 miles, buttery clean leather, buttery clean MOT apart from the odd rusty brake hose ferrule, spic and span bodywork and wheels etc - but it has an expensive sounding problem. The ad tells us that there’s a warning on the dash – DSC SYSTEM FAULT – and even provides a picture in case we don’t believe it.
Before the internet we’d all be racing not to touch this Jag with each others’ bargepoles because DSC SYSTEM FAULT sounds like it will kill your bank account in the time it takes to douse your Arthur Daley cigar in the ashtray that cars like this used to provide. In Jaguar-speak, DSC as we all know stands for Dynamic Stabilty Control. As Jaguar itself puts it, ‘the DSC system helps to maintain the vehicle's stability in critical driving situations, e.g. during unstable driving behaviour such as understeer and oversteer. If required, the DSC system manipulates the engine's power output and applies the brakes at individual wheels.’
It sounds horrifically complex and financially ruinous, but after a few keystrokes on his minging old Amstrad Shed found what could well be the solution: a five-minute recalibration of the ABS system at your friendly local Jaguar dealer, at a cost of £20 or less if the technician likes the cut of your jib. If that is indeed the fix - which, of course, it might not be - what are you left with? A very handsome and comfortable old-school Jaguar with a 235hp naturally aspirated six-cylinder engine and a rating of four or five stars by 117 out of 135 actual owners on a well known used car reference site.
In addition it gives Shed yet another excuse to publicise this classic YouTube clip of one-time F1 racer Antonio Pizzonia at Donington mixing up the cornering ability of a V8 S-Type with that of his F1 car, rolling it at Redgate while former-Autocar scribbler Steve Sutcliffe hung calmly upside down from his seatbelts in the passenger seat inquiring after the health of the hapless pilot. Another benefit of the internet you see. You’d never have seen Sutters establishing his credentials as the coolest dude west of the Pecos on the telly, in the Daily Wail or down at your local Odeon.
So, let us celebrate the wonder of modern communications technology while at the same time hoping that the seller doesn’t have the time to use it. We wouldn’t want him reading this old nonsense and then cranking the price up.
Unless I'm being blind then it would be me embarrassed- looks like they've stuck a normal plate atop an older, specially shaped one.
That's a proper grandad spec S-type; as mentioned above I'd be after a phase 2 car with a bit nicer spec but for the money I guess it's a decent option.
Very on the fence about these cars. On the one hand, quite a lot of car for the money and I’m sure very pleasant to cover long distances in. I think pastiche styling was questionable when new and hasn’t been helped by the passage of time. And the centre dash area is criminal! But it’s £1350 and a lovely colour so…
Worse yet, the turn in was wooly and it made for a very boring drive.
The gen 2 cars were a much better effort on all fronts.
Didnt help a lot were in truly lame colours, my wifes aunts very posh friend always had an S Type in some Duck Egg blue shade, suppose it was a ladies car so perhaps she chose a more feminine type of colour but it just didn't suit the car, and there were plenty of beige and gold ones, with some overly small wheels. Though the right grandad spec can be quite appealing and I must say the dark green is a lot better than t could have been.
I am sort of warming to them though, its always got the fact its a Jag and its RWD for it, I even quite like the styling now, they went the whole hog on evoking the Mk2 and original S type.
Its funny, sixties jag saloons are now quite expensive but as a kid, in the mid eighties I used to play in a scrapyard at the back of Jag specialist and there were loads of them, they were largely worthless and more appeared fairly regularly. A bit like S types now really, now I am not tipping them for classic status but we will probably think they were very cheap at one point, like this one and they arent all absolutely rotten like the sixties ones were. The image will die off to a point (Brexit Chariot yadda yadda) and I think some will wonder why there is such a cheap, interesting old car nobody wants.
Not looked at the MOT history but on the face of it, looks pretty good, would take a cosmetically good one that needs a few jobs underneath over a battered one with a ruined interior, cant see the DSC thing being a massive problem, there is only so much to that system and its usually a wheel speed sensor, not shortage of secondhand bits and the XF used this platform until 2015 so no shortage of new parts I expect.
Wont be cheap to run, but hey, its £1300, probably less with a cheeky bid, its a good shed this week for me. Would need to change the headlight bulbs, sort the lenses so it doesn't look like its got jaundice.
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