BEST 'ERGO' ?

kr79:
Carryfast i admire your determination but the build quality of 70s and early 80s jags was not a patch on the likes of mercedes.
Yes more survive then mercs of that period but thats down to the affection of the marque and thosr that do susurvive have probaly all been restored with lots of care.

Firstly you need to take into account the price difference when comparing the Jag with a Merc or a BMW and what you were actually getting for the money in the case of the Jag.I’ll post just a representative comparison from 1974 as an example.The XJ12 was priced at £5270 while the Merc 450 was priced at £8,811 and the BMW 3.0 Si was £5301.Bearing in mind that the BMW 3.0 Si which I bought off of it’s unhappy first owner for around £900 in the early 1980’s was a 1975 reg with 57,000 miles on it’s clock. :open_mouth: :laughing: :laughing: Whereas the equivalent XJ12 would have lost nowhere near that amount.

Probably because of the fact that with the Jag you were getting a decent V12 engine,rack and pinion steering,and wishbone suspension all round as opposed to a 3.0 Litre 6 cylinder motor,1950’s type Ford steering box and McPerson strut front suspension,and Triumph type semi trailing arm rear suspenion amongst other ‘issues’ like a body which rusted as bad as any FIAT.While the Merc wasn’t a lot different it was just that the extra £3,500 :open_mouth:,over the cost of the BMW,bought a 4.5 Litre V8 which was a lot of money to pay for an extra 1.5 litres and 2 extra cylinders over the BMW let alone the 4 fewer cylinders and almost 1 litre less than the Jag.In fact for the price of the 4.5 litre Merc you could have bought the XJ12 ‘and’ a Triumph 2.5 and still had change.Or even better modify the Jag with a manual box and up to a 7 litre engine upgrade. :open_mouth: :laughing: :laughing:

Which is why very few of those old E3’s or 1970’s Mercs survive unlike the old XJ simply because when all the political bs,concerning so called ‘better’ German products,was stripped away,what you were basically left with was an over priced,overrated,expensive to maintain, poor value for money heap by comparison with it’s Leyland competition.While the German car buyers often shot themselves in the foot by listening to all the bs concerning militant British workers and then rushed out and paid over the odds to subsidise the much higher wages of German workers who therefore didn’t need to strike. :unamused: :smiling_imp: :bulb: I just hope that the seller of that BMW that I bought for £900 was one of them. :smiling_imp: :laughing:

The fact is since Thatcher’s ideology won out history has been taught from the point of view of the victor. :bulb: :unamused: :wink: