As I get older I find more and more that I am tempted to say "I told you so!" Is this the wisdom of experience or a celebration of the blindingly obvious? Things happen; governments, companies and other organisations do things which seem to me obviously wrong, yet they press ahead anyhow, only to find later that things do not work out as they thought. It is here that I want to say "I told you so!" Sometimes I, and I am sure many others, remember previous actions which produced exactly the same result as they do second and third .......... and fourth time around.
Now, Jaguar have apparently decided that they need a small car to compete with companies like Mercedes and BMW. To me this has always been obvious. At the end of last year they ceased production of their small car, the X-Type, because they said it was a failure. No it was not. It was a good car and from my experience, everyone I have spoken to who has owned one thought it was a good car as well. It never sold as well as Jaguar wanted and this, I would suggest, was because the marketing was so awful. I think it was so bad because there were people inside Jaguar who did not want it to succeed. In its initial incarnation it had a transverse mounted engine with front wheel drive plus an option of all wheel drive. These were revolutionary ideas for Jaguar and were, in fact. Ford engineering. Soon they offered a version with 2 litre diesel engine that was front wheel drive only. This was so non-Jaguar that the traditionalists wanted to ensure that it failed. So fail it did. There are many, like me, who drive an X-Type and love it.
At the time the Jaguar spin men told us that they intended to go for an upmarket niche for luxury cars and not waste time on a "cheap" Jaguar where margins were low and there would be too much competition. I thought that this was crackers. Most people know that niche markets are only niche markets because they are not worth having. Jaguar need to be able to knock out a good quality small[ish] car for around £20,000 to £25,000 with lots of good options on engines and interior fittings to meet every market - like the BMW 3 Series. Now somebody in Jaguar has reached the same conclusion and pictures of a new small car have appeared in Auto Express. The new XF and XJ are selling well but they will never match the X-Type - which in spite of everything always sold more units than all the other models put together. The new baby will be conventional Jaguar rear wheel drive and with an aluminium chassis and many other features form the XF and XJ should be on sale in 2012.
I like the suggested looks of the new car and if it come out at the right price, hopefully, one day I will own one.
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