Jaguar Politics
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Sir,
Sir John Egan, who recently announced his decision to resign from the Jaguar board, re-activated that honorable British company using difficult and advanced procedures, and supervised the selling and making and designing of a handsome car, now built to respectable standards.
I don’t expect that we will be allowed to know about the influences at work between, for example, Mercedes-Benz/GM/Ford/DTI/Jaguar. But at the time he told us possibly that the DTI had not consulted him or his board about a financial injection of any sort. It had taken him by surprise.
In my view as an outsider without financial interest, but who is fond of Jaguars (although the worst car I ever had was a 2 1/2-litre saloon device) the Jaguar should never have considered any kind of collaboration with any other car-maker (because it might lead to confusion in terms of marketing, finance and perhaps production). Jaguar said at the time (last autumn) that they did not need sales or spares networks.
If, for some reason, another car-maker’s money seemed irresistible, Jaguar should not have accepted from Ford, a producer with a very different reputation and history from Jaguar’s.
I reckon that this sad piece of business is all part of the pervasive and nasty standardisation and degradation which now shows itself in too many fields of life.
Nicolas P Johnson
London, NW3