Less is more bleat the Greenies who insist that we should all drive electric toy cars like the G-Whiz when in fact more can cost so much less. Don’t believe me? Then go and buy a used Jaguar. That’s what I’ve been telling everyone to do for the last few months and I’ve got a marvellously mixed reaction.
The official reason why some of us are more than slightly interested in Jags at the moment is that the company’s up for sale and they are poised to bring out a saloon that to be honest looks like a Lexus. The real reason is that everyone wants to buy a Jag because they are cheap and so that they can say they’ve got one. That’s despite the fact that the majority of drivers are silver haired and look like they are on their way to the golf club.
Also, what’s the point of having a boring German car like me when you can get yourself a motor with proper leather and wood, rather than sitting on something that feels like vinyl and looking at a digital photo etched onto metal. It is so very tempting to buy a Jag for a few hundred pounds as I nearly did in the West Country. I studied the stock list at a specialist cheapy car dealer and found not one but two of the beautiful blighters. One was a 1992 model marked down from £995 to £795 with a year’s worth of MOT for goodness sake. Even better a ’93 example was £495, but it turned out this one was a spares or repair job. Actually that sums these models up as they are completely the wrong Jags and more specifically wrong XJs to buy. These ‘80s and early ‘90s saloons are known to automotive anoraks by its code number: the XJ40. I think the 40 stands for the number of days each month they spend off the road and up on a ramp.
It’s best to pay over £2000 for the later model (X300 to the anoraks), which is the point at which Jags got a lot more reliable. So imagine my shock and surprise at coming across a 1996 XJ6 3.2 Sport at £1695. One owner, 113,000 miles and when I called the price had dropped by another £100. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get there quick enough, it was just that the Jag is 150 miles away and I have to drive there in a potential part exchange.
I’ll have to keep you posted on that one. Some might reckon that rather than choose the big old dinosaur that is an XJ, I really should be looking at something a bit more contemporary like an X-Type or S-Type. Scratch the surface and there is a Ford not far underneath which may explain the patchy sales success and the fact that my local dealer keeps offering me new Jags at Zero finance like it’s a Citroen or something. Consequently I found a 140K mile 2.5 X-Type for just over £3000 or an S-Type for £2600, which looked lovely in the online pictures.
Me: Hello can I buy your cheap Jag S-Type?
Them: Course you can mate.
Me: What’s it drive like then?
Them: Well…. it doesn’t actually drive.
Me: Why’s that then?
Them: It needs a new engine.
Me: Bye.
Them: Bye. Bye.
The thing is though I could buy a fully functioning S-Type for £2999 even if one of them was white and being desperately marketed as a second string wedding car. I still reckoned I was right to stick with the XJ because it is my personal belief that there is no substitute for feet and inches. I wouldn’t feel safe in an electric car that’s only made out of soggy cornflake packets.
Now a big old Jag, long before the Euro crash testing, came out safest in real world crashes. Some nutters though found out about my really rather uncontroversial views that a big old barge is better and begged to differ. I agree that safety has certainly moved on a lot but I was probably only thinking in a ten-year envelope (and the car probably has some air bags anyway) rather than a 1980s Volvo. Incredibly, you would be safer in a 1980s Saab 900 rather than a 1990s Saab 900, which was structurally weaker than the model it replaced. Mind you the safety nutters were nothing compared to the Jaguar nutter, sorry enthusiast, who rang me up tohave a go and accuse me of not being sufficiently pro Jaguar and anyway he believed that they were not that cheap or driven by middle aged men in tweed.
Well I’ve just proved that they are cheap and I want to buy one so he’s wrong on both counts. Indeed, Used Car Expert should club together with its clever readers and buy Jaguar. We’d then cut out the first buyer and make the best used cars in the business proving once and for all that you can get more for less.
Words: James Ruppert