The peerless Jaguar E Type – A Brief History
The Jaguar E-Type (UK) or XK-E (US) is a British automobile completed by Jaguar amid 1961 and 1975. Its mixture of design, high performance, and aggressive pricing ingrained the auto as an symbol of 1960s motoring. An important triumph for Jaguar, over 70000 E-Types were sold during its lifetime.
One of the world’s most well-known sports cars, the Jaguar E-type,turned 50 in 2011. The auto caused a stir when it was put in motion at the Geneva motor exhibition in 1961, and it still does today.
The E-Type was a wonder from the moment it was put in motion. Hardly any could expect an automobile this appealing was British. And, of course, it was super quick and was priced at a just-about-accessible-dream charge of ?2,000.
From the initial sixties, the established idea of the draughty and cramped sports automobile was declining. Even lower priced models were improving in terms of relaxation and comforts. Still, by new standards they might seem primeval. There were actually three variants of sports auto for sale in the 1960s: petite, inexpensive sports cars such as the Austin-Healey Sprite, MG Midget or Triumph Spitfire; middle-sized motorcars, still small by modern standards: the Triumph TR4/5, MGB and Sunbeam Alpine; and fast, strong and costly machinery, starting with the Austin-Healey 3000 and E-Type Jaguar. A person electing a vintage car all these years later would need to decide on one of these three groups and pick a car from them.
The E-Type was phenomenal. It was a result of the mathematical and engineering craft of Malcolm Sayer and became the first large-scale assembly motorcar based on aeroplane principles.
Malcolm Sayer
Born in Cromer, Norfolk, UK, Sayer was schooled at Great Yarmouth Grammar School (where his father instructed Maths and Art) and subsequently at the then Loughborough College. He worked for the Bristol Aeroplane Firm in the course of the Second World War, which exempted him from induction by way of retained occupation care. After the war he wedded Pat Morgan in 1947, then went to work in Iraq in 1948.
He returned to britain in 1950 and joined Jaguar in 1951. Some of his particular ideas were the introduction of slide rule and seven-figure log tables to work out formulae he invented for drawing curves, work which is now undertaken by complicated cad software.
History of Jaguar
Jaguar Cars Ltd, also known purely as Jaguar, is a British luxury motorcar producer, based in Whitley, Coventry, England. It is a totally owned branch of the Indian corporation Tata Motors Ltd. and is run as part of the Jaguar Land Rover firm.
Jaguar was born as the Swallow Sidecar Corporation by Sir William Lyons in 1922, initially manufacturing motorcycle sidecars before evolving into passenger cars. The name was developed to Jaguar after wwii due to the unwanted connotations of the SS initials (The SS was fashioned in 1925 as an individual defense guard unit for Adolf Hitler). In the wake of a merging with the British Motor Corporation in 1968, finally subsumed by Leyland, which itself was subsequently nationalised as British Leyland, Jaguar was catalogued on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, and became a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index until it was gained by Ford in 1989. Jaguar has, in recent times, manufactured vehicles for the Prime Minister, the most recent delivery being of a XJ version on 11 May 2010. The firm also holds Royal Warrants from HM Queen Elizabeth II and HRH Prince Charles.
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