Jaguar XJ-S Cabriolet – Driven To Write

Welcome to the Machine : Part Seven

More than one way to behead a cat.

The XJ-S at its Geneva 1988 debut. Image: Car Magazine

Following the carmaker’s remarkable return from near-death only three years previously, America’s movers and shakers were once again buying Jaguars in number. “The word has got out on the cocktail circuit that the Jaguar is the car to have”, Jaguar Inc Press Officer, Mike Cook told journalists in 1983. But the lack of an open-topped XJ-S model would soon become a genuine impediment to sales growth. From this point onwards, US requests for a convertible would become increasingly strident.

The Jaguar board realised that the expediently engineered XJ-S Cabriolet could only buy them a certain amount of time, but meanwhile something needed to be done to mollify potential US customers, for whom nothing but a full convertible would suffice and who would otherwise simply Continue reading “Welcome to the Machine : Part Seven”

Welcome to the Machine : Part Six

Giving the XJ-S a brake.

Nobody ever purchased a Grand Turismo motor car for its load-carrying capabilities, there being vehicles better suited to such tasks. But for a select few, such binary propositions exist only as orthodoxies to be upturned. It requires a certain mentality to envisage the recasting of something as indulgent as a 2+2 GT into an estate car. But in order to fill a vacuum, one must first Continue reading “Welcome to the Machine : Part Six”

Theme : Secondhand – Do Not Resuscitate?

As we approach the end of this month’s theme, we ask whether there is life beyond secondhand

You may not have reached that age yet (though I think I did at around 16) but one day you look in the mirror and ask yourself “how did I get to look like this”? The physical proof of the passing of time seems totally out of proportion with the short period you feel you have spent on the Earth.
This appeared near to where I live in South-West London last weekend. It’s sitting in the street, the passenger window wide open to the elements. Has it been stolen and dumped or has someone local bought it, with the prospect of restoration, only to find that the electric windows go down, but not up? Continue reading “Theme : Secondhand – Do Not Resuscitate?”