CAR magazine had a great tradition of long drive stories. Alongside the scoop features, supercar drives and frank, to the point of blunt, reviews and summaries of many cars, these helped the magazine stand out in the 1960s and 1970s. I caught up with it in the mid 1970s, and remember this one well.
The premise, as often in such stories, was very simple. Was the V12 Jaguar XJ as good as the magazine suspected for a long distance grand touring trip?
Find out by driving to Budapest and Lake Balaton in Hungary, around 1000 miles from Coventry, behind the Iron Curtain.
Impressive cruising abilities and efficient air conditioning, as well as better than expected fuel economy, are early takeaways. As the journey progresses, the car is paid less attention as the landscape and people take precedence, as you’d expect.
The return journey was slightly more complicated – I’ll let you read the full story, but not just for pausing to test the BMW 733.
The overall conclusion makes interesting reading – a great grand tourer if you afford the fuel, let done by bought in components and the limits of the long distance customer support network. But in great demand, and I’d have one now. Wouldn’t you?
Thanks Roger. I loved CAR mag in the 60s and 70s. They were hard to get in the Netherlands so I took a subscription for a couple of years.
Must have been wonderful to be able to travel in communist countries. So different.
Interesting to see the failures were not British made but West German (Hella) and American (GM).
Oh, yes, I add somewhat sarcastically. All the failures are due to the rotten foreigners. That explains it. Still, the English have leather making down pat. Well done, chaps, well done.
I used to like Car and I do still enjoy these old stories. I buy old copies now and again because good car articles aren´t found on paper any more (we have CC!). That said, the jingoism of the articles from back then is often grating. And what I took to be outspoken honesty was often just empty opinion. The patronising articles about Japanese cars are especially annoying. Setright was more willing to praise Japanese cars (he loved the Toyota Soarer) but Georg Kacher was less open and he never failed to apply his rather poor design judgement to the aesthetics of Japanese cars.
I suspect LJK Setright had to acknowledge the Soarer as a superior evolution of his beloved Bristol or Alvis coupes. Still, I went through a period when I though Setright and Henry N. Manney along with Denis Jenkinson, were the finest automotive writers, if not all writers.
The key words “We had done more than 2000 miles in this car and its ability as a long-distance touring car proved itself beyond questions” ring quite hollow when the car in question actually failed to finish the journey due to a broken gearbox (carefully pointed out as being an “American” GM supplied part) and had to be towed back to England. It kind of takes the bloom off the rose of the idea of wanting to take one anywhere long-distance. Never mind the lights failing on the road, and whatever the mysterious vibration was.
Funny too that the DeTomaso Longchamp is seriously mentioned as a potential, if dark horse, competitor. BMW 633, sure, MB 450SLC, all day long, but the DeTomaso? On a long trip? You’d have to be mad, surely.
Great piece though, Roger, I too read and enjoyed many of these CAR epic road trips over the years, they did them well. Once German Georg Kacher joined as a news contributor (and was thus invited along sometimes) there was often the added bonus of coming across the same journey written from a different perspective in a different magazine. R&T occasionally had someone there as well from what I recall, at least in the ’80s.
For years….decades…I lusted after a Jaguar XJ 4 door.
Until I actually owned one for a little over a year.
I developed a fondness for reliable Buicks and Lincolns after owning (or did it own me?) Jag.
And then the nonchalant phrase imploring both the Jaguar folks and the reader that “we were not upset.” Oh, really?? That might not have been the case if they needed to pay for it or hassle with getting it repaired in a foreign country.
Great article, but not quite a ringing endorsement of traveling via Jaguar.
I believe these Jags used the GM THM400 automatic, one of the best and most reliable of all time, also used by Rolls and MB. I find “Car” blaming this supposed failure on the supplier suspicious, to say the least.
Keep in mind that the “no less than exceptionally good” fuel economy at cruising speeds (~16 miles per gallon) was achieved with imperial gallons – each of which is about 1.2 US gallons. In US gallons this would equate to about 13.3 mpg. Imagine what city mileage must have been. Nice interior, though (I have this very issue of Car somewhere).
Thanks for sharing. I always enjoy reading Cold War-era accounts of journalists driving the latest and greatest cars to the other side of the Iron Curtain.
If you’d like to see another such article, check this one out from the February 1958 issue of Popular Science: Inside Russia by Car.
The last half-paragraph is obvious payola. Had it not been published, that magazine’s authors would never have been allowed another Jaguar to play with.
Absolutely not: see comment below. A true toady would not even have included the breakdown in the story at all.
I hope Paul will forgive me mentioning the fictionally legendary motoring scribe Archie Vicar who, in a kind of not-real way scooped Car´s 1977 article with his three-part drive around the Baltic in 1968:
https://driventowrite.com/2013/11/01/1968-jaguar-xj-6-road-test-archie-vicar/
If you don´t get as far as the link, the heading paragraph sayd this: “Archie Vicar continues touring from London to Latvia in Jaguar’s new XJ-6. His mission, to test this important new saloon and to recover his hand-made shoes left behind on a previous jaunt!”. The article supposedly appeared in “Private Motor Car Owner” (Dec, 1968, pages 34-39, page 109, page 116, December, 1968).
I like this bit:
Day Four
Getting into Latvia was a breeze. We presented our passports and sacrificed a few cherished boxes of Craven “A” cigarettes and we were in. Even the sight of the new Jaguar, in De Luxe trim and virtually rust free, didn’t make the unshaven brute at the border blink. It seemed like we would sail through under the dusty hem of the Iron Curtain.
But then we spent 9 hours waiting at a road-block deep in the middle of nowhere.
Dashing through fields the size of Rutland while caning the XJ’s 6-pot engine (cc/170 in³) I appreciated the civil ride (courtesy of the telescopic dampers). Then I noticed what looked like a telephone box. I knew something was skew-whiff since they don’t have ‘phones in Latvia. It was a check-point. Dropping my fag into the deep-pile lambswool carpet, I gripped the controls and stamped on the stop pedal for all I was worth. An alarmed-looking sentry sprang from the wooden crate and noticed a hundred yards of dust rising behind the tail of Browns Lane’s barge. Such was the violence of the braking that snapper Land-Windermere emerged from his slumber. The guard told us to wait. L-W groaned. Good brakes though. I must have been doing the ton.
The dust eventually cleared. There was absolutely nothing around us but a jolly big ploughed wasteland so I had some time to make some notes as we waited. “Good engine but gargles a two pints of fuel every hour when idling – worse when in motion” says one. “Nice armrests. One really feels as if one is in a sports car,” says another. “Must limit the cigarettes to six packs daily. Only 480 left to last me four days,” says the third.
The luggage hold in the Jaguar is patently inadequate so there wasn’t enough room to stow sufficient baccy. Frankly, I’d say there were more cubic inches in the ashtrays than in the boot. It’s more like a rear-mounted glove box. I do rather hope Jaguar address this problem in the next version of this otherwise worthwhile vehicle.
The Hungarian-built motor coach on p.43 is fantastic! Traveling around the old Warsaw Pact countries in the 90’s, I saw quite a few elaborate, double-decker sleeper coaches and assumed they were the way to travel instead of flying.
I think it is an Ikarus 55, powered by a rear mounted straight 6 Diesel getting 170hp from 8.3 liters….
It appears that the driveline vibration caused the rear bearings of the transmission output shaft to deteriorate. Turbo 400s are nothing if not generally reliable, having been used in everything from trucks, to muscle cars to Cadillacs since 1964. It seems that engine acquitted itself nicely, it is a pre HE (high efficiency ) which was a major change to the engine. Still 12 cylinders aren’t the best recipe for economy. The XJ coupe was a beautiful machine.
Was this version officially called XJC5.3? I knew the V12 was 5.3 liters but when I first saw the title, a 327 SBC Chevy swap came to mind.
Yes, officially the XJ5.3C and XJ4.2C, but we all called them the XJ-C or XJ-12C.
“Fusslessly?” I suppose they wanted to avoid the overused “without a fuss.” That was before the trans got fussy.
The two 80’s XJ I’ve sat in didn’t have enough seat cushion for long trip comfort. My thighs were on their own.
Roger, thanks for posting this — I found it fascinating both from a car perspective and also from a travel perspective.
I started reading CAR about 10 years after this article was published – and loved both the writing and the subject matter. The article reminded me why I went to the effort to get a copy from the bookstore each month.
As for the Jaguar, I was wondering when the big problem would crop up — not the tires, not the headlights… ah! the transmission! But they got further along on the trip than I’d expected.
CAR. Seems like I bought it somewhat regularly in the late 90’s. Interesting perspective on things. LJK Setright! Hadn’t thought or heard of him in decades. Seemed like he wrote for C and D for a while. I did enjoy his work though.
But the Jag. I finally figured out it was what I think of as an XJ12C, and it fit so many stereotypes. Basically, nice, when it ran. Much as I dislike GM, the tranny failure did surprise me. Soviet block Hungary also filled stereotypes. Massive security at the border, more easygoing once in.
Yes, Roger, I would have one now. Even on the days it wasn’t running, it would still be a glorious sculpture to contemplate. It’s simply one of the best-looking postwar mass-made cars. And besides, it has a V12.
This is great writing. It largely avoids cliche, which is a hard task in motor writing. There has long been nothing equivalent to these sort of long-form tales since the glory days of the magazines. Unfortunately, such stuff did eventually spawn imitators, with each imitation fading from the preceding one, until such time as such articles were nothing more than unreadable ego-inflating crap.
The fact that the car broke is not important. Look on this very site for reprints of long-term tests, and see how very unreliable the cars of the wondrous past really were. In any case, the really complex parts, the injection and engine and the climate-control a/c, did not break, and to have a GM 400 fail is truly bad luck.
It is worth pointing out that the author of this article owned the magazine itself, having bought it with two others for 5k pounds in 1972 (ultimately selling it to Murdoch in ’89 for 8 million pounds). Any idea of payola in glossing-over the breakage is laughable. Fraser set the iconoclastic attitude of CAR from early times, and strongly backed any journalist who would diss any car, right through his ownership. It is also worth pointing out that CAR never pretended to be a consumer’s publication, but always, if eccentrically, for enthusiasts. That’s also why the largely (dynamically) awful Japanese cars of the ’70’s got so much stick, and things like useless, marvellous Alfasuds were praised to the skies.
One last point. The jingoism WAS a thing, in each country too, but the great irony of it being in CAR is that Fraser, Nicholls (Editor) and literally ALL the CAR editors from the ’60’s to the early 2000’s were in fact Australians!
At one point a team from CAR drove a Peugeot 504 to Tehran, where they sold it. Apparently selling used Western cars in Iran was a thing, and the 504 fetched enough money in Tehran to make the venture worth their time. They were neither the first nor the last people to do this. Of course this was before the Khomeini regime.