Step up to the plate…
Sometimes, it’s the little details that make a car really special. You can have the smartest Jaguar in the world, but if it has universal floor mats then it’s no good for our Craig…
I’M THE FIRST person to admit that what matters to me about cars is often completely irrelevant to most people – after all, I collect car brochures, 1:43 scale models and obsess over random car trivia (especially from the 1990s) in a way that bores most of my family and peers senseless.
But I feel I’m in safe company here, so if I want to talk about number plates and floor mats I will do. After all, for me they’re often two of the things that make a car.
Silly as this may sound, it’s one of the reasons why I recently felt compelled to rescue a 2002 X-TYPE 2.5 SE (Our Jaguars, January 2024). It was a tidy enough car with a good history and was offered to me for a song but what really charmed me was that it still wore a 21” x 6” front number plate, as opposed to the standard-size 21” x 5”.
It took me right back to 2001, when the over-sized front number plate was a trademark of Jaguar’s new compact saloon – a small detail that I’d noticed as a young journalist covering the press launch, and which I’ve carried on noticing ever since in the X-TYPEs hastening attrition. These days, though, the original plates are rarely seen – most cars have had them replaced at some point, either when resold by a used car dealer or down to parking damage or deterioration, and it was only the pre-facelift X-TYPEs that ever got them anyway.
I have a similar fixation with rear number plates on Jaguar S-TYPEs. When they first came out, every S-TYPE had a tailored oval numberplate that sat fairly squiffily on the boot lid – a trait it shared with the Rover 75 that became its arch-rival in the quest for column inches at the 1998 British International Motor Show.
Most S-TYPEs have been through a fair few owners by now and as a result the original “speech bubble” number plate has long since been replaced with an oblong one. But to me they just look wrong – like encountering a full-stop in the middle of a sentence, or a ‘y’ in a sea of ‘x’s.
If you turn to this month’s Our Jaguars on page 108 you’ll see that yet again I’ve let my guard down and another car has somehow infiltrated my life. Another S-TYPE indeed – and guess what the very first thing I’ve bought for it is? Put it this way, this month’s issue is the only copy of Ja
