CRAIG CHEETHAM

Buying another Jaguar

THERE HAVE been hundreds if not thousands of column inches written of late on the subject of fuel prices, and not without good reason. After all, it’s an emotive subject and one that we’re all having to face up to, with the average cost of filling up a family car increasing by around £30 over a period of just a few weeks. Even with the latest duty cuts, petrol and diesel are still ridiculously expensive commodities.

When you run an old Jaguar, that’s a pinch you’re going to feel, but unless you swap to a smaller and more frugal car, there’s no escaping it. And if you’re someone who, to friends and neighbours, ‘knows about cars’, there’s also no avoiding being cornered and asked for help.

That’s what happened to me very recently, when a friend in the small town where I live asked for my assistance in finding him a new work car to replace his six-cylinder petrol Mercedes-Benz (I almost bought it, but the reasons why I didn’t will soon become apparent). He’d decided that with a 70-mile daily round commute, he wanted something that wouldn’t hit his wallet quite as hard at the pumps. Since I have a lot of contacts in the local motor trade, I said I’d have a look around.

The trouble is, everyone else is doing the same, so the market for frugal hatchbacks has gone potty. The days of buying a 12- or 13-year-old runabout for less than a grand are long gone, and I found myself looking at average Astras and tedious Toyotas, rapidly re-evaluating what my perception of a bargain should look like.

Setting my search parameters to a limit of £2,000 within 50 miles of home was a dangerous game, though, not least because a tenyear savings plan I’d invested in many moons ago had just matured and – to quote Father Ted – the money was “resting in my account”.

So, while I eventually solved my friend’s transport problem with the purchase of a diesel-engined Peugeot 308 for a very sensible

price through a trade contact (I’d have kept the Mercedes myself), I also found myself looking at a few rather more interesting cars, the vast majority of which (well, all of them) had a Jaguar badge on the bootlid. And while the sensible thing to do would, of course, have been to close my computer screen, collect the Peugeot for my mate and call it a job well done, I didn’t. I instead found myself on a train to Lincoln with a pocket full of cash, the collecting of which was an adventure in itself thanks to the fact that nobody uses paper money anymore. I had to make an appointment at my bank and take my passport, but the trade-off was that I turned part of my investment into a new-tome Jaguar. The above photo will tell you what it is – an S-TYPE – but in this case it’s also a pretty special one. I FIGURED I’ll leave the story of the car for the next THERE WAS issue of Jaguar World though, since during the course of my research another Jaguar piqued my‘NO HARM’ interest. It was also just inside my £2,000 search IN GOING TO parameters and was even closer to home, so I TAKE A LOOK figured there was ‘no harm’ in going to take a look. So I did and at the time of writing, I’m due to collect it in just a few days’ time. I guess I’ll be telling you about that one in the fullness of time, too, but let’s just say, it’s a fair few years older than the S-TYPE and is a very, very lovely thing indeed. So what’s the moral of this story? It’s this; if you have a friend who’s in the market for a cheap car then it’s probably not a good idea to offer to help them out, especially if the money you ought to be spending on the family holiday is burning a hole in your pocket. But if you have the same atrocious levels of willpower as I do, there’s also never been a better time to go and find a lovely but inefficient old Jaguar. Irrespective of what fuel costs per litre, there’s no better way to travel. And if you’re going to pay through the nose to fill the tank, you might as well do it in style, right? You can’t take it with you, after all… CC