Just curious if anybody has heard any feedback on the New Jags from the new Indian company?

 

Rattan Tata is a Jaguar fan. His grandfather and father owned Bentley 's, Roll's and Jag's. That's what he grew up with and the brands he owned when he was of age.

He came in wanting to save his favorite brand and restore Jaguar to its former glory. In his mind, between Roll's and Bentley. When we were told he was going to raise Jaguar up, basically taking our fastest models with the richest appointments and making that the new standard I thought they'd have to raise the price up by tens of thousands.

The price did increase but only by a couple thousand. Compare the 2009 XF 4.2 to a 4.2 S Type with everything the XF had and the XF'S price is lower. Every year more and more content is standardized. Every year the product is improved.

Ratan loves Jaguar and wants them to best possible. To be that, he's invested billions into Jaguar and has no plans to ever sell them. He's the best steward Jaguar could ever have.

The Jaguar unions, even the suppliers all petitioned Ford to sell it to Tata, over 3 other companies, to that were British because of the man's reputation. That's pretty strong.

 

Word is that Tata has reversed the Ford principle of the engineers being subservient to the bean-counters. The bean-counters are now there to support the engineers in attaining their aspirations for the cars. Also the decision process has been speeded up; no longer does anything new costing over $20 have to go all the way to Dearborn !

Don't get me wrong, Ford did a huge amount for Jaguar, they must have spent almost the US defense budget putting the production facilities right. It was Ford who taught Jaguar how to build cars properly after the long British Leyland interregnum.

 

That's good to hear. I'll try to keep my str going for a while longer.

 

I will say that working on the new cars is great (except interior stuff, but I always hate that.) One thing that surprised me is that there is more stuff in this car stamped "FoMoCo" on the car now then there was when Ford owned them. I understand why, but still surprising