Peaen to an Old Jaguar
If you’ve no love of cars, I’ll see you in the next tale of Retarded Dystopia
There’s something I’ve always loved about good motoring journalism. Some say the late Russell Bulgin was the master of the art. Others Jeremy Clarkson. I rather liked the other OG Evo boys – Meaden, Bovingdon, Harris et al. But most of the time, I’ve found it difficult to get as emotional about cars as I feel ought to, as a man who loves speed and helmsmanship above most other things. So I was never cut out to be a motoring journalist. Too much bullshitting about bad cars, just to please corporate editors whose advertisers and patrons have them over a barrel.
Nevertheless, I occasionally get emotional over cars and feel the need to write about it. There’s no guarantee this means good motoring journalism, but let’s see how it goes.
It’s the end of an era for me today. I agreed to trade-in my aging Jaguar XF-S. Born 2012 and hopefully to go on to a happy and productive life in the hands of another.
You know when it’s time to part with an old love. It’s bittersweet, but you know it’s for the best, and that the fond memories will live with you for a long time.
Just the facts, ma’am:
Black, four doors, four wheels with absurdly low-profile tyres and a spare skinnier than an anorexic Gen-X girl. I had to have those wheels returned to a circular state after an angry exchange with a makeshift car park. “Jaguar or Range Rover?” the man asked me when I phoned him up to inquire if he could straighten 20” wheels. He knew. Those wheels were never beautiful but today they are messy. Absolute brake-dust magnets, bubbled lacquer. Sad sad sad.
A V6 turbo-diesel engine upon which a magic trick has been performed. Stand outside the car when started up and you think of combine harvesters. Yet from inside it’s quiet and silky, as a Jaguar should be. The delivery of 272 horses is always unctuous through the 8-speed ZF gearbox. It has a feel of lazy and effortless progress you must learn to love if you last experienced the same gearbox, with different programming, in a BMW. There was always the theoretical option to turn the dial to “S”, but this would have been like asking the Queen if she knew any Soundgarden. Not something I was ever inclined to do in the six years I owned her. The car, that is, not the Queen.
The XF has the outside footprint of an E-Class Mercedes – you feel every inch of it in a car park or on a country lane - but the feel from the driver’s seat is of a rather smaller, more figure-hugging car, courtesy of the huge amount of magical sonic cocooning between you and the plebs outside. This is a car that never makes you think it’s made of aluminium, though on the outside it actually is.
I ought to say I can count on one hand the number of times I asked it to prove its claimed 0-60 time. But of course that’s not true. I’ve arrived at a toll-booth in it hundreds of times, and have always been back up to speed in less than 6 seconds. There’s no other way.
Not only is it one of the very few cars I’ve experienced that can still honour demands for factory performance after 10 years and 100,000 miles. It’s also the only car I’ve ever owned that has consistently met or exceeded the claimed economy figures. A part of that is the diesel engine, but the other part is the calm this car is able to instil even in someone like me who spent 60% of his time in a BMW M5 with his right foot welded to the floor and a further 25% of his time putting more fuel in it.
The Gripe:
Let’s get this out of the way before the true joy. There’s one thing that infuriated me about this car every single day. It had a laminate layer in the windscreen that was meant to stop the interior getting hot in the sun. That kinda worked. But what worked without fail was its impish ability to block GPS signals to my phone at the very moment I was unsure which direction I needed to go. I almost threw my phone out of the window and parked the car on a hill without the handbrake several times on account of this. The hilariously useless 2012 sat-nav system was no consolation at all.
There used to be a gadget you could buy - a remote Bluetooth GPS transceiver. This would have solved the problem but, about 8 milliseconds before I realised this was what I needed, they were deemed un-necessary by the market and, in the blink of an eye, all manufacture and sale of them ceased. It became easier to safely buy crack cocaine in a police station than to source a Bluetooth GPS transceiver. I never solved this problem, and it’s the one burden of which I’m delighted to be relieved.
The memories and the residue:
In spite of having previously owned several moderately interesting cars, I was delighted to take ownership of my Jag. I paid cash and I didn’t trade anything in – the beater I drove up in would be passed onto my then girlfriend. She still has that car. I was delighted to transition back into a properly commodious car after a couple of years in what, in comparison, I’d call an unkillable Japanese shitbox.
The delight was instant. The discovery that there was such a thing as a comfortable, quiet, luxurious car that sipped fuel but could pick up its skirts when asked, and yet was also treated kindly by other road users. It was a stark contrast to my ownership of BMWs, Mercedes and Porsches.
I don’t think I ever paused to reflect and give thanks for my time in those Teutonic conveyances. I never felt the need and I don’t think my instinct was wrong, no matter how much fanny batter I’d had to scrub out of the leather seats before I traded those cars in.
Though on paper not such an exotic car, for me this Jaguar was simply in a different class. It’s the difference between the sense of occasion you have at an Elgar concert, and that experienced when Tool or Rammstein play live. There’s simply no comparison. Perhaps 20 years ago it wouldn’t have been my thing, but over the last six, it most certainly has been.
My Jag did, on occasion, let me down over the 70,000 miles I put her through. But I never hated her for it.
The first time was a big adventure. We’d seen Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and gone on to a grand tour of Italy. We’d loaded up with thousands of cigarettes in Belgium, driven for extended periods in Germany at more than 150mph and taken onboard a literal half-ton of wine in Tuscany.
With hindsight it seemed inevitable that things were due to go south, with hard acceleration. Best hotel in Genoa, a wealthy Bulgarian called Boris with a bottomless appetite for Bollinger, a huge booze-fuelled bust up with my girl leading to her receiving actual injected Valium in a local hospital and ending with her getting a taxi to the airport in disgrace.
The Lord is all powerful though, so I was entirely unsurprised the following morning to find my hungover ass in a service station on the autostrada between Genoa and Milan. The Jag had suffered an equivalently catastrophic breakdown, and I was having a truckstop shower while I waited for a man who didn’t speak any English to haul me and my car to a backstreet garage on an industrial estate in Buttofuco, Alessandria. The intercooler was fucked and the parts didn’t exist in Italy. The nearest town was the Italian word for “arse end of nowhere” and 10 miles away from nowhere.
Thanks to the wonders of RAC European breakdown cover, I didn’t have to worry, so long as I didn’t worry about my need to make a hundred phone calls to well-meaning and incompetent dullards in Lyon. It’s very hard to be mad at French or Italian people when you love their self-assured half-assedness as I do, realising that it’s a way to make competence look cool, in a way the English just cannot do.
The following week was an unrehearsed blizzard of flights, hotels and hire-cars. All of them shonky, all of them hilarious. At the hotel I ordered a burger, of which all the constituent parts arrived except for the bread. At that point in my life it felt like the best meal I’d ever eaten, even before the local wine, the mama-made tiramisu and the grappa barricata had weighed in on my mood. My emergency hire car had a wheel that didn’t seem to be of the same size or manufacture as the other three. As I was going home for an interim few days, a baggage truck ran belligerently into the fuselage of the plane at the boarding gate. After 5 hours on the tarmac while repairs happened, the captain ushered us all back into the terminal where we queued for drinks and food. 10 minutes later he ran up the airbridge to urge us all back onto the plane so we could take off before he ran out of flying hours for the day.
I had no regrets about the additional 5 days I ended up spending in Italy when I went to collect my car. I met a couple of lovely cats and an almost as lovely tennis coach. I became unduly enamoured with my hired Fiat Panda, but nothing ever came of that in the end. A mere holiday romance, making a virtue out of a necessity. I developed a comical pidgin Italian language habit, aided by Google’s life-saving translation app. Literally no-one spoke English in the bit of Italy that I was confined to. I patted myself on the back when I understood the mechanic who explained that he’d removed all the foglios from the space between the radiator and the intercooler in my car. Of course I know what a foglio is, you wonderful sun-baked peasant. Every good Alfa Romeo has Quadro of them. That mechanic was, in fact, a motorsport mechanic and his billed hourly rate was about €30 as he replaced my broken intercooler. The Jaguar mechanics in the UK earn that in tips, with half the game.
My Jaguar and I got reacquainted on a lovely journey back to England via the relaxing and gorgeous byways of France. By happy accident we “had no choice” but to stop over on our homeward journey in one of my favourite cities in the world – Reims. What a shame. To their credit, the RAC were not expecting that expense, but they rose to the occasion nonetheless. I stayed in a charming family-run pension and enjoyed the French delight and excitement at them winning some kind of big football thing. I think it might have been the “Coupe de Monde”, whatever that is.
Not long after my car and I got back to the UK and normality started to return, I was diagnosed with a brain tumour. After the customary NHS waiting period in purgatory, I vividly remember the 50 mile drive, in the Jaguar, to the hospital for my operation. It could have gone either way, and I wondered out loud if I was driving to my own funeral. It would have been far more upsetting to make that journey in a Ford Fiesta. Alas, it went the right way (so people assure me), and I was ferried home in the Jag a week later.
I didn’t drive again for six months. But when I did – and I had to learn all over again, in many ways – I always felt looked after by her.
My rehabilitation and return to normality was soon to butt up against what some people were calling “the new normal” courtesy of the ludicrous Wuhan farrago. My new employer had never liked people working from home, but now they had no choice, so I took the opportunity to make my home in a remote and lovely part of the country. Hundreds of hours were expended on hilariously deserted roads as I made my way back and forth, choosing a place, choosing a house, sealing the deal and making my move. I had proven that I could – if needed – get to my supposed place of employment in under two hours and without arrest.
When the old normal came back in 2022, that turned out to be more like four hours, so I never bothered. Instead got myself appointed as an ambassador to our facility at the other end of the country, to which I could travel in business hours, on expenses, in the comfort of my Jag. And where I discovered a brilliant, family-run, Italian restaurant and made lots of new friends, ate plentiful tiramisu and drank considerable grappa.
There was a hiccup early in 2022, and the same system on the car that had failed in Italy failed again, though in a different way. Hose be mad. Thankfully it happened towards the end of a journey home from the other end of the country. I was able to limp back to base and, in the morning, call my local man. Not a Dave, but a Darren. A very good Darren, who had owned several cars with the same engine mine had.
I never had a breakdown in this car cost me more than £600 to repair, and there were only a couple of those in the time, so I wasn’t worried. I’d not call it torrid, even compared to the four untroubled years I spent with an AMG Mercedes, which ended sourly due to incompetence of people, rather than the car.
Over the summer, however, doubts started to enter my mind. I fought them. When my friend with an identically engined XJ told me of his woes that ended up needing a replacement engine, I consoled myself that he’d put 175K on his, and I had years yet before I needed to worry. But a month ago, on the way to the other end of the country, all the alarm bells lit up on my dashboard. I read the OBD2 tea-leaves and they told me a sorry tale. It was the same fault my friend had first seen on his XJ. Something that was difficult to narrow down to one of four possible causes, all of which implied expensive remedies. I cleared the fault, drew breath and continued.
To my relief, the error didn’t come up again on my return journey, but the corrosive doubt was introduced. I couldn’t trust the car to get me to and from the other end of the country until the greatly-in-demand Darren had a chance to assess things, so with regret I left her on the driveway in sub-zero temperatures and got into a hire car.
There’s something very metaphorical about a good hire car, as I alluded above. The pretty new thing knows tricks that the old girl has never heard of. Younger, slimmer, neatly trimmed and clean. Importantly, you can throw her around and thrash her with impunity. So long as she doesn’t need any urgent treatment as a result, there’s no comeback.
Once you’ve experienced those new tricks she has, you can’t unknow them. Adaptive cruise control? Android Auto? How could I ever look the same way again at the old girl after this epiphany?
Back at the homestead, the fault on the Jag didn’t reappear over several hundred miles. “Get thee away until the fault is evident” chided a grumpier-than-usual Darren.
The seeds were planted. “Fuck this shit” was grumbled. Given that the Jag had a dicky ticker, and I now had new itches to be scratched, it seemed like there was only one thing to do. I was on Autotrader ogling pictures of similar models to the hire car that I’d used like an Amsterdam window dressing, but when my brother sent me a picture he’d found on the internet, I knew the die was cast. She was the one. The new one. Young, fresh and vigorous. Equipped with all the new tricks I desired, and more. And she was just within my reach.
So today, I went to the stable that was selling my putative new inamorata, and it was good. The deal was done.
Some details are to be sorted, during which time I’ll enjoy one last journey to the other end of the country and back in my Jaguar, for Christmas - fittingly enough. And after that, it will be a fond and yet wrenching farewell to the best car I’ve ever owned and the only one I’ve ever really formed an emotional attachment to.
Onward, hopefully to even better.
“Reversing camera cannot be found” complained the Jag as I reversed her off the drive this evening. “Refer to your dealer” she implored. No. Hahahahaa…. Don’t you get it? This is our ending. Make it a nice one. Don’t try to ruin it for me with new complaints you never raised before, you temperamental hag.
It’s like she knows and is trying to make it easier for me to say goodbye. That’s an experience I’ve had before.
Oh. The new model? An impeccably endowed, powerful and svelte Swedish redhead. Striking on the outside, wonderful to be inside. I just hope her adoptive Chinese parents don’t turn out to be a plobrem.
AJ
Great post AJ, been having similar feelings about my ageing 3 pronged oil burner. In my case, the head turner was a svelte red headed Korean, with a thumping V6 under the bonnet. I only had her for 24 hours whilst the local main stealer fixed my suspension.