8:10 am, December 3, 2022
Hands up if you’ve ever wasted half a day of your life attending to a problem with a car that wasn’t a problem!
Right then. If you’ve not got your paw in the air, I don’t believe you, as after four-plus decades in the motor trade, I’ve done this at least once a year, often making a right tit of myself in the process (which I believe is the official term).
As of last week, I can add another stellar performance to the list – and it goes like this…
Like many of you, I expect, I’ve had to diversify in recent times as the car market has got ever more challenging.
For me, the money at the moment is in ‘future classics’, or in other words, one person’s old banger that is another’s cherished treasure.
The ‘treasure’ on this occasion was a 23-year-old Jaguar S-Type 3.0, owned by an old boy from new until 2020 and by a bloke since who just wanted a big old Jag to smoke around in.
But with prices at the pump not getting much smaller, he chopped it in at my lot a few weeks back for a Kia Rio – hardly a modern classic, but to his mind a safe bet at £2,995.
I’d beg to differ, having had my head beneath a few 11-year-old Korean cars over the past few years.
But he left happy and I gave him £600 part-ex for the old Jag, which was its Cap trade-in value plus a few quid on top for it being a seemingly good, low-mileage example.
I’m no fool, though, and having owned and worked on old Jags over the years, I knew that its low mileage of 85k and fully stamped service book up until the first owner popped his clogs wasn’t necessarily a guarantee of a good car.
After all, from the mid-1990s, Jaguar was ruled by Ford accountants, and they weren’t especially forthcoming when it came to spending money on underseal.
Still, the gawky S-Type, once described by Jeremy Clarkson as looking like a ‘startled pufferfish’, does actually have a pretty good following among enthusiasts.
I’m guessing this is because as they get older and their eyesight starts to fail them, it begins to look more and more like a classic Mk 2 but without the high five-figure price tag.
I figured, then, that even if it needed a tickle with Wayne the Welder’s sparky stick, it would still be worth punting on, with a fresh MOT and a gushing description on one of the specialist classic car sales sites.
Like all skilled car dealers, I parked it in Poo Corner with all my other part-exers and forgot about it for a bit.
That was until such time as I was low on stock and needed to find something to sell in order to pay this month’s instalment of my exploding mortgage, which has gone up like Notre Dame did when someone dropped a fag end on the balcony.
The S-Type seemed like easy money, so I booked it in for a test to see the potential extent of my welding bill and went to go and get it started, as the battery was as flat as Liz Truss’s popularity ratings after the mini-Budget.
That’s when I hit a snag.
Like most Jaguars built since the 1980s, the battery isn’t conveniently located next to the engine it’s supposed to start, but is instead buried deep inside the boot, under the spare wheel carrier and itself a feat of mechanical skill to access.
I’d allowed myself half an hour to disassemble the boot floor, but in the event, I needed longer than that.
You see, when I went to attach my trusty jump pack to the car – my intention being to further pollute Birmingham by leaving it running for half an hour to whack a decent charge back into the battery – I went to open the boot only to find the key wouldn’t turn in the lock.
No amount of wiggling, jiggling or enthusiastic squirting of WD40 would free it, and with the central locking firmly, erm, locked, there was no way in without giving the car some form of electricity.
The back seats don’t fold, so while I could open the driver’s door and turn the ignition, getting into the boot was a dead loss.
Luckily, I remembered my days of selling the things nearly new and I know there’s a ‘secret’ positive terminal buried deep inside the front wheel arch.
Attach one jump lead to that and another to a part of the chassis (if, indeed, there is any of it remaining) and you’ll have just enough power to blip the central locking and open the boot.
The downside is that to get to it you have to jack the car up, remove the wheel and then unscrew the wheel arch liner, which will undoubtedly be welded in place by screws that have seized solid with 20 years’ worth of road grime over them.
Much swearing and faffery ensued and I had the arch liner off and the old trick worked.
I was able to get in, attach the jump pack and fire the old girl up – whereupon the central locking promptly activated itself and locked the car shut with the engine running.
I knew that in the office I had the spare key, though, so back into the Portakabin I went to retrieve it – except there were two…
The key I’d been using all along wasn’t actually one of the Jaguar’s two main keys but the valet key that was kept with the service history, and would only ever have opened the driver’s door and turned the ignition.
The main key? Yes, you guessed it. I went round the back of the car, popped it in the hole and it opened the boot first time…
On the plus side, it sailed through the MOT, the tester describing it as the best S-Type he’d seen ‘since about 2008’. I’ll include that in my sales patter, I think.
This column appears in the current edition of Car Dealer – issue 177 – along with news, reviews, interviews, features and much more. Click here to read and download it for free now.
