Nice car this one. I bought it from a mate in Woodley (Reading) for about £1250. It was a deep blue with cream / brown interior. The only issue it had was a dented bumper and a couple of other minor bits that were easy to sort. I got a secondhand bumper from a company called ‘Jagnuts’ who did a roaring trade in secondhand Jaguar parts for the old XJ series. I think the bumper was around £150 and seeing as it was straight and the chrome was spot on, was a bit of a deal. I think that this car has one of the nicest dash layouts of any car, walnut amd brown/cream leather interior.
The suspension was a bit soggy compared to the later XJ8’s (of more later) but th ride was really good. Fuel consumption was a bit on the scary side, from memory it did around 20 mpg and the thing was about the size of a small barge. Bit tricky to park but as with all big vehicles was OK when you got the feel of it. One of the things that I really liked about this was the fact that there was a really nice and convenient place to rest you left foot which was out of the way of the pedals and was actually comfortable without your knee pressing on something hard. When you have size 11 feet these things are important. Another good feature was that you could change the humidity in the car as part of the air con system. New cars have this done automatically but it was good to be able to go between Sahara dry and tropical rain forest. We used this car to collect some reclaimed parquet flooring from a reclamation yard in Bath. There were three of us in the car and we managed to get in 23m3 of Rhodesian Teak in one go. We had it in the boot, on the seats, under the seats, on the parcel shelf, in the glovebox and i’m fairly sure I had the last two blocks down the front of my grolleys….. we came back on the motorway with the suspension scraping on the body on every bump…..
I part exchanged this in for a much newer XJ8 with Lancasters in Reading after having it for about a year or so.