XJS Review May 11th 2019
 

This is one of those Reviews that I found a pleasure to Watch and this is The Six Cylinder XJS

We are already seeing XJS prices going up in Australia. A good facelift I6 import will set you back $20-30k and a 6.0L V12 north of $60k for coupes add $20-30k for a convertible.

Good find, OB. I would have liked him to point out more about the car as a car, as he tended to waffle a bit. Interesting to see that the steering wheel on his four litre appeared to have a vinyl centre, whereas my V12 has a leather one. I do wonder how strong the smell of leather (not wood; I'd be astounded if you could smell any wood from that small amount thoroughly covered in lacquer) is, however. Mine has very little leather scent, and I wonder if that's because it's a Japan-market one and the Japanese do not, in general, like the smell of leather.

Warrjon--doesn't Australia make it expensive to import cars anyway? When I eventually get around to selling, I'm wondering if I want to ship it overseas first....

Hi Someday

Cheers!

Also thinking along the same lines of Selling my Celebration Convertible in OZ where I would imagine it would be quite rare over there, although I've heard that Import regulations are quite strict, which may or may not be so

Hopefully Warrjon and Grant will jump in and demystify the process for us both

I suspect a fair amount of the price is all the taxes or tariffs or whatever Oz charges. I know Japanese imports are (or at least were) much cheaper in NZ due to the lack of government autocracy.

I have not watched the video yet - this weekend. I'll say that was one of the remarkable (and lovely) things about both my 89.5's: You can smell the leather. I don't mean only after the car's been hibernated over winter (which I didn't have to do in Texas), I mean every single time you opened the door you were greeted with the scent. Intoxicating.

I do remember that when I went overseas for a couple of weeks and then came back to my car, the leather smell was definitely stronger. There's a very mild scent in my car most times, which is barely detectable. I've actually bought some Chemical Guys leather scent spray to see if I can boost it.
One thing that makes me suspicious about whether JDM Jags have the leather treated to remove the smell is that if you look up "leather scent car" or something like that in Japanese, most of the results are "how do I remove the smell of leather from my car?" Remove it?? REMOVE it?? And while you can get hundreds of different car scents from places like Autobacs I have never seen leather.

SD
the leather used in later facelift cars is cured differently and lacquered differently from earlier 1970s and 1980s cars.

Hmmm. Do you know any sites that discuss that in more detail? It might have a bearing on my leather-care regime. I have heard hide food isn't much good on any vaguely modern car, for example.