XE Launch

YouGov’s poll in the Scottish referendum destroyed any hope Jaguar might have had about front pages and TV news channels. Exploits on or above the Thames presupposed Monday would be a slow news day and it was not. Spectaculars may be great for a management’s morale but good cars don’t need them. Three E-types at Geneva and lunch for press at a lakeside restaurant were enough in 1961. More attainable than a Ferrari, more charismatic than a Rolls-Royce, racier than a Mercedes-Benz the E-type stamped its image on a generation. The Mini made it big with a day’s press testing on a military test track at Chobham.

To be fair it’s not easy nowadays to make much of a new car. You can’t break a story in style. They are so conformist. The new XE looks so much like the XF and XJ it may pass un-noticed. As a family rendition it’s great. It is what the X-type should have been, yet perfectly good though it was, failed at. With a starting price of £27,000 XE takes on the 3-series BMW. It has advantages including being largely aluminium (Jaguar is careful to call it “aluminium-intensive”) and the F-type’s wishbone front suspension and integral link rear promise good handling. It is the most aerodynamic production Jaguar, with a Cd of 0.26. The quick S has an 8-speed automatic.

Unfortunately there is not much new about XE that you can see unless you count “The signature J-Blade running lights; another instantly recognisable Jaguar design element. In the rear lights, a horizontal line intersecting a roundel is a powerful styling feature inherited from the iconic E-type.” The aluminium and the Ingenium engines will be great but the helicoptering and the costly VIP endorsements reveal a collapse of confidence. Winning Le Mans used to be enough to get attention and reassure customers. Now Jaguar puts on stunts and made a great deal of working with “multi-platinum” (whatever that is) singer songwriter Emeli Sandé to create what it called a FEEL XE track, inspired through social media. Fans were asked “What makes you feel Exhilarated?”

Emeli premiered the new track live on the Thames as part of what Jaguar called an exclusive 45-minute set on a floating stage in the middle of the river. Three hundred guests watched from another boat and there was a projection-mapping spectacle on County Hall. “To create a truly stunning setting The London Eye, County Hall and Shell Building were turned red, while a series of red flares were launched along the river to turn the skyline red during the performance.”

BMW and Mercedes-Benz introductions are by comparison low-key. Audi would think it inappropriate. Their cars speak for themselves.

There’s nothing new. Jaguar flew the XE to Earls Court by way of Tower Bridge (left). Ford did the same 44 years ago (right) celebrating its millionth Cortina with a 2-hour flight to a new owner in Ostend.

From next week it's a whole new Dove Publishing. http://www.dovepublishing.co.uk

Deft design at Jaguar

Jaguars inspired designers beyond Jaguar, but none had the certain touch of Sir William Lyons. Bertone, Pininfarina and Giugiaro never matched Jaguar’s founder for identifying Jaguar customers. They were Italian of course. Jaguars were essentially English and middle class. From sunburst upholstery and faux nautical ventilators of the 1920s SS, to lookalike Bentleys of the 1940s Lyons understood his clientele. He provided them with big headlamps and walnut interiors, good proportions and discreet understatement. Jaguars looked not-too-racy and in perfect taste. His skill rarely deserted him although he probably over-embellished his second thoughts. No XK 140 or 150 matched the purity of the XK 120. Later E-types never had the plain elegance of the 1961 original, much the work of aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer.

It all went wrong with the XJ-S, also partly Sayer’s, and made uncharacteristically with advice from fashionistas, who encouraged square headlamps, and salesmen pushing Jaguar up-market.

Nuccio Bertone had a go in 1957 with a car based on the XK150. The effect was quite close to the Jaguar idiom and in 1966 he did a nicely proportioned 2-door coupe on an S-type saloon. It looked a bit like the Sunbeam Venezia by Superleggera Touring three years earlier launched, if that’s the word, with gondolas in Venice. Pininfarina’s 1978 XJ-S Spyder was a stretchy E-type and William Towns tried an origami one sadly no more successful than his knife-edge Lagonda.

Giugiaro had a go in 1990 with the Kensington based on an XJ12 platform, shown at Geneva, which in my 11 March Sunday Times column I thought important. Jaguar style at the time was being obliged to address a wider market than the English middle class. Giugiaro occupied the high ground of automotive haute couture in 1990, with big commissions from the Far East as well as a series of VWs and Alfa Romeos in Europe. It was deceptive. Giugiaro was never into voluptuous curves and his Jaguar was heavy and rotund. Detailing was good. The grille and classically Jaguar rear window were fine but it remained a one-off. There was no encouragement from Jaguar, which regarded it very much as ‘not invented here’. Bertone tried again in 2011 with a slender pillarless saloon, the B99 hybrid.

The inhibitions designers face now make anything profound or distinctive in car design next to impossible. Crumple zones, pedestrian impact rules and headlamp heights are so constricting that anything ground-breaking is unlikely. Jaguar head of design Ian Callum’s hand is far more repressed than ever Lyons’s or Sayer’s was. Committees lobbyists and legislators, mostly now in Brussels, call the tune. Customers play second fiddle.

Pictures: (top) Sir William Lyons (left) with Tazio Nuvolari, XK120, Silverstone. (Top right) Bertone XK150. (left) Pininfarina XJ41. right Bertone's "Venezia" and left Giugiaro's Kensington. Below Pillarless hybrid at Geneva.

Another COTY winner

COTY jurors aren’t voting for Car of the Year. They are voting to look Green. Why else would they have elected the Ampera in 2012? They surely can’t have expected it to sell more than a handful. They’re not that stupid. No, they are spooked, along with governments round the world, by what WS Gilbert called greenery yallery Grosvenor Gallery foot-in-the-grave young men. Or women.

Opel and Vauxhall dealers, who hadn’t a lot of choice perhaps, accounted for the first year’s 5,000 or so Amperas. That sank to 3,184 last year and collapsed to 332 in the first five months of this, of which only 46 were in its German home market. GM Vice Chairman Steve Girsky vented frustration at Geneva: “All the governments in Europe said, ‘We want EVs, we want EVs.’ We show up with one, and where is everybody?” The answer is that they were off buying something else, real cars mostly.

COTY jurors are like governments appeasing Green voters with inglorious wind farms and wasteful subsidies. By any standards the Ampera was a disaster. Production is stopping and although GM will redesign the broadly similar Volt next year it won’t come to Europe.

There wasn’t much wrong with the Ampera. It was sensibly-sized and quite handsome, drove smoothly and quietly and as a hybrid didn’t have the range anxieties of milk-floaty plug-in electric cars, attracting complaints now about how costly they are to top-up. Apparently charging stations take money by the hour, without knowing how much electricity is actually being used. The cost can be just as much for a battery flat or near full.

I have said before that there is a FIFA flavour about Car of the Year. In 50 years COTY has never elected a Jaguar, Range Rover or Land Rover. It can’t be anti-British-ness. Munich doesn’t come off well either. There has been no BMW; a range that goes from Rolls-Royce to Mini has never made the grade except for second last year for the i3. It elected an electric Nissan yet COTY doesn’t do safety. Volvo and Saab never featured. Engineering excellence? Bentley has never made it. Production quality? There have been no Hondas. Value for money? No Skodas, no Seats but 9 Fiats, 6 Renaults and 5 Fords. I can’t understand why manufacturers get so excited by it.

Gentlemen ran Jaguar

Sir Nick Scheele, who died last week aged 70, was in the purest image of Sir William Lyons, Lofty England and top men at Jaguar. Accessible, well-mannered and businesslike, their style was reflected in the public relations executives who were their links, Bob Berry, Andrew Whyte, David Boole and Joe Greenwell. Scheele, graduate of Durham, multi-lingual, urbane started with Ford in 1966 and after a distinguished career became chairman at Jaguar in 1992. He persuaded Ford to resuscitate the old Escort factory at Halewood to manufacture the Jaguar X-type. It now thrives exporting Range Rover Evoques. Rising through the office side of the Ford organization, Sir Nicholas Vernon "Nick" Scheele KCMG according to one obituary had the debonair poise of an actor, combined with “a backbone of stainless steel”. He was one of the industry’s most articulate spokesmen.

In 1994 Scheele challenged Coventry raise £400,000 to build, equip and run a new place for the NSPCC. To help child abuse victims and celebrate 100 years of the charity, the money set up Boole House in Whitefriars Street, named after David Boole who worked tirelessly on behalf of the appeal and died only days after fundraisers reached their target.

Boole may not have had quite the charisma of Jaguar racer Bob Berry, nor the great historical knowledge of Andrew Whyte, who researched and wrote some of the best books ever on Jaguar. But acutely aware of Jaguar heritage he agreed to buy into Dove Publishing’s Jaguar File. There was no formal agreement beyond a handshake, no correspondence; he died as work on the book began. Joe Greenwell took over his responsibilities, accepted our word and Jaguar got its book. It went into three editions, many reprints and is now, revised and updated, going digital. Greenwell became CEO at Ford in Britain and commissioned editions of The Ford File.

Sir Nick came to the press launch of The Jaguar File at Stratstone in Mayfair with Greenwell (left), Eric Dymock and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu on the right. Michael Kemp of the Daily Mail lurks behind looking, as ever, for a story.

Casimir Brau’s Panthère. MG’s Tigress. Jaguar’s jaguar

Jaguar’s leaping jaguar was not always a jaguar. It is third from bottom right in the 1925 catalogue of French sculptor Casimir Brau who describes it as a Panthère. In 1930 it appeared at the Olympia motor show in 1930 on an MG — as a tiger. Five years later SS Cars’ founder William Lyons instructed Bill Rankin, his publicity chief, to commission a mascot to go with his cars’ new name, Jaguar.

Brau’s 300 Franc mascots are now collectors’ items (below). Survivors auctioned by Sotheby’s in the 1990s went for upwards of £500. By 2010-2011 Brau originals sold by Bonhams as “Leaping Jaguar, circa 1925, retailed by Hermes, Paris, signed, nickel silvered bronze, 8¼ins long, on a wooden display base,” were going for £4400.

The link from Panthère to Tigress may have been Frederick Gordon-Crosby, a sculptor and artist whose work appeared in The Autocar and who was a close friend of Cecil Kimber, general manager of MG. One appears on Kimber’s desk as a paperweight in this official portrait, taken in 1933.

Michael Gordon-Crosby, the artist’s son, suspects that Kimber’s Brau statuette inspired the mascot on the 18/80 special edition Mark III (see below) that Kimber wanted to call the Tigress. A magnificent 2.5litre, six-cylinder car, it almost matched a Bentley in grandeur. Crosby liked the leaping animal so much he even had one on his own 18/80 saloon’s radiator cap. Only five Tigress MGs were made and probably only a handful of mascots, one of which was presented to author and MG historian the late Wilson McComb, from colleagues at Abingdon in 1969.

Lyons wanted to add a fast bird or animal to SS. The name may have stemmed from Standard Swallow; the SS1 was effectively a Swallow-bodied Standard Sixteen. It might have meant Standard Special since much of it was made by the Standard Motor Company. George Brough, who made Brough Superior SS80 and SS100 motorcycles, claimed he had thought of it first but it seems more than likely SS was coined from the great ocean liners of the 1920s and 1930s, like SS Mauretania, Majestic or Aquitania.

Armstrong Siddeley had used Jaguar on an aero engine but managing director Sir Frank Spriggs had discarded it and happily consigned it to SS cars. S.S. Jaguar had a ring to it and the following year even the full-points were omitted, “As the letters no longer stand for anything,” much as M.G. had once meant Morris Garages and long before the Schutzstaffel (protection patrol) Nazi police meant anything.

An accessory company produced a bonnet motif he disliked so Lyons asked Rankin to come up with something suitable. Rankin approached Gordon-Crosby and SS Jaguar’s jaguar was identical in almost every respect to the MG tiger (or tigress), save its back paws. On the Jaguar version they are tucked up behind. MG’s had them extended,

Whether Lyons and Rankin knew anything about history of the mascot scarcely matters. I approached Jaguar in 1992 about this sidebar to company folklore. Its spokesman the late David Boole was unabashed. He solemnly denied tigress and panther antecedents. “Our ‘leaper’ is an anatomically correct jaguar”.

Actively exhausting

Who now remembers basso profundo Triumph TR2s? At about 2,400rpm, as I recall, they made a deep crisp booming noise which, if you got it to coincide with a low bridge or a long retaining wall reverberated beautifully. You can scarcely imagine Canley engineers solemnly conspiring to provide it – maybe they did – but it was always tempting to accelerate in second or third gear to achieve the delightful crackle. This, you felt, was a sports car. Anybody overhearing must love it.
Well, they probably didn’t. They probably thought it was just a noisy car but aged 19 or 20 it didn’t occur to you that anybody could dislike it. They might as well not like Beethoven. Or the Beatles. TR2s weren’t very fast; 0 to 60 in 11sec and 105 or so mph, but they felt fast.One TR I knew well, (left) Ian Brown’s, OVD 888 on a Scottish Rally.
It’s different now. I don’t like noisy cars as much, but I have to make an exception for the F-type Jaguar. Engines nowadays are so muffled and de-toxed that crisp crackling exhausts are pretty well outlawed. The racket that thrills motor race spectators has been muted, so in an almost wholly successful effort to restore what was regarded as an essential feature of a sports car, Jaguar has what it calls an active exhaust system. Electronically controlled valves in it open to what Autocar described as their angry position, under hard acceleration or when the driver selects Dynamic on the touchscreen. A satanic roar, the testers said, at 4500rpm and a very lovely scream between 5000rpm and the red line.

Jaguar F-type. Silent when stopped.

Active Exhaust is reinventing what young “scorchers” had in the 1920s. Cut-outs enabled drivers to by-pass silencers at the touch of a switch or a lever, reducing back-pressure and squeezing out a few more precious horsepower for overtaking. Or simply making more noise. Jaguar doesn’t claim any extra bhp from “active” exhausts but it sounds magnificent. And you don’t need a low bridge to get the best out of it. TR2 rev counter on the right