With all the media coverage on that Type 01 I took some pride in washing my trusty 2008 Jag over the weekend, it was absolutely reeking manky. I'll not be swapping this for a Type 01 because I know I wouldn't like it. I'm not quite sure what this means for Jaguar but people that have older models I think they will be like myself and just glad with what they have because Jaguar did make some tremendous vehicles, remember that they had a 2.5 billion pound profit in 2014.
Diesel Engines were terrible for the company, absolutely damaged their reputation especially the 2L Diesel - widespread reliability negative discussions all over the internet tarnished their reputation too - some of it warranted more of it not so much. They generally sold far fewer vehicles so any issues people have had would have been getting far more negative attention especially in the last 15 odd years with the age of social media as opposed to say BMW a company who sold probably a 100 fold increase in vehicles but who weren't angels themselves.
I think it's bad management - poor marketing and the mass availability of all the German vehicles which were used as pool vehicles and which people people got on attractive lease schemes, Jaguar could never reach this level of competition - BMW and Audi did diesel engines better too. But the V8s is what made Jaguar, I specifically got a 4.2 because it's just a wonderful thing it uses up zero oil between changes and just wafts around at 100mph hardly moving past 2k RPM. It's a tremendous engine and sounds wonderful, I drive on B roads and heading to work in the morning I often drive through a short cut birds hear the engine in advance and scatter all over the place..I'm not even driving quickly it's actually quite muted in the cabin but outside not so much. You can actually feel the resonant hum of the engine when you touch the accelerator at around 2-3 rpm. So it softens the petrol fill ups somewhat.. which are quite frequent it has to be said. Potholes on the other hand are always a grave danger, I've memorized about 90 square miles of roads around me and I wish that was a joke. The upper and lower control arms on this are all from the factory, they won't be cheap to replace and I know most of the suspension parts aren't even available anymore.
The 5L uses direct injection which runs at very high pressure and puts far more stress on the engine plus the lower viscosity oil isn't helping with the weakened timing chain tensioners.
There's still a huge amount of people driving Jags, it's not the end of the world - the future is uncertain but the past has created enough William Lyons heritage to fill out showrooms.
