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New Jaguar XJ
New Jaguar XJ
In common with most cars like this, it’s a lovely looking machine – a style marvel; sleek and vapid, mercurial.
It’s also a waste of space and a waste of effort.
It’s two tonnes of mass for a 400kg payload is pants. An ecological disaster zone.
Money for Old Rope
New York Congestion
Not only that, with the firm reputably losing £1m per day, it’s cost of >£50k to a tad under £90k means that 10-20 will need to be sold each day just to cover that loss, without any pretence at covering their own manufacturing costs.
Utah Congestion
Tata, it’s Indian owner paid $2.3bn for the company. Now the UK and Europe are being asked to bail it out for £300m to keep the 15k workers in jobs and preserve the veneer of a static environmental world, bathed in an everlasting sea of fossil fuel. Ravi Kant sees profits in two years…
Worldwide, Jaguar sold ~65k cars in 2008. Most luxury makers are seeing sales drops of at least 20% for each of the last two years. Many barely made money even in the good times!! This figure covers some fuzz though. Because these 65k cars cost from ~£20k to ~£80k, a simple like-for-like calculation cannot be made. The intention is to drop some models next year in favour of the more expensive car. So 65k cars again?
I don’t think so. Call it 50k cars.
Melbourne, Australia congestion
The irony isn’t just in the financial gloss applied to make it appear that Shangri-La is returning very soon; a bizarre hope exists of a ‘business as usual’ scenario, when we can repeat the whole cycle again.
The irony is in the design of the vehicle, it’s presentation to the public, and the public’s perception of the machine as a desirable status symbol, swooping over life’s problems like fuel shortages, the congestion of our urban sprawls and speed limits.
The Jaguar website provides full technical specifications for the vehicle, which show it to have good acceleration and economy. They fail to point out that the standard laws of physics mean these aren’t at the same time…
Bored young Jaguar
The slow-motion pictures at the beginning of the launch video aren’t slow at all. This is real-time speed in a traffic queue, the place where the vehicle will spend most of it’s travelling life.
And whenever the Jaguar owner feels like opening it up to it’s 155mph limited maximum, hopefully they’ll be reassured that it’s lightweight, rivetted aluminium structure is stronger than that of the similarly shiny, magnesium and aluminium Mercedes which was in this crash below, at only 125mph.
The point is that rapid transport itself is a luxury. Although we in the West have become accustomed to ever cheaper travel of all types, this has been at the expense of the future. Like the credit crunch, we are “leveraging” today’s resources against tomorrows expectations of a miracle. The pot of black gold isn’t bottomless, but the continuing production of anachronisms like this beautiful car, seeks only to deceive us that it is.
The only miracle will be if people see the truth that they’ve been living in a dream world for the past century. In the 35,000 years of human existence, these last hundred are but a plip in a pond.
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