About this archive
Changelog
A dated record of the substantive changes made here: new pages, reworked sections and corrections, including the ones the archive would rather not have had to make.
Entries cover changes worth a reader's attention. Wording, layout and typography adjustments are not recorded. Where a change was a correction, the correction is described rather than summarised away.
Selling an E-Type
A new page on selling an E-Type: the routes to market, what the Heritage Certificate and the numbers can and cannot show, describing the series, steering side and changes honestly, the British paperwork and the law, payment scams, and a short section on selling in the United States. It quotes no prices.
Winter storage and lay-up: new section on mice, rats and a stored car.
Winter storage and lay-up: new section on mice, rats and a stored car.
Added links to the companion XK140 and Mk2 archives
Jaguar Cars Compared now links to the Jaguar XK140 Archive and the Jaguar Mk2 Archive, and notes that the XK140 Archive publishes its own XK production totals, separating chassis numbers allocated from cars built.
Jaguar Cars Compared: added Series 1½ and Series 2 prices and road tests
The two E-Type rows that carried no road test or price now do: a Modern Motor test of a Series 2 coupe from March 1971, American tests of US-specification Series 2 cars from 1969, and prices for the Series 1½ and the Series 2 2+2 from the 1968 and 1969 Motor Show guides. A note records which of those figures best represents a British car.
Added Jaguar: The Complete History and Jaguar Cars Compared, 1948 to 1975
Added Jaguar: The Complete History and Jaguar Cars Compared, 1948 to 1975
Added Jaguar Cars Compared, 1948 to 1975
Added Jaguar: The Complete History and Jaguar Cars Compared, 1948 to 1975
Series 3 American introduction and prices
The Series 3 page now records the American press introduction at Palm Springs on 26 March 1971. The prices page adds the United States port-of-entry figures announced there, with John S. Radosta's New York Times report of 27 March 1971 as the named contemporary source.
Series 2 now links to the Series 3 page
The Series 2 page described the archive's Series 3 coverage as factual rather than in depth, which has not been true since the Series 3 page was expanded. The wording has been corrected and the sentence now links to it.
The variants section now means body styles and specials
Four variant pages repeated a series that is covered at greater length on its own top-level page, so they have been retired and their addresses now redirect permanently to Series 1, Series 1.5, Series 2 and Series 3. Everything they said that the series pages did not has been moved across, including the radius arm mountings and bonnet shut line checks on Series 1 and the curved 2+2 screen and larger calipers on Series 2.
Two duplicate pages removed
Two pages which repeated material already published elsewhere have been removed: a short overheating article covered in full by the overheating diagnosis and the cooling system article, and a short page answering how many cars were made. The production numbers page now answers that question directly, and carries the one figure and the one caveat the shorter page held that it did not. Nothing published on either page has been lost.
The E-Type's other names and spellings
The page on the car's two names now covers the other spellings in common use, including E Type, etype and Type E. The American name now appears on pages written for American readers.
The 150mph claim given its own page
The archive's account of the 150mph claim, the racing tyres, the gas flowed head on 9600 HP and Autocar's own retrospective concession, now has its own page rather than sitting inside the specifications tables. The three places which previously answered the question separately, the specifications page, the Series 1 page and the questions index, now point to it.
Modification dates and breadcrumbs in the structured data
Articles now publish a dateModified where the archive holds a review date, and stay silent where it holds none. Breadcrumb structured data has been added to the technical, diagnostics, variants and identification sections. The review dates previously hard-coded into ten route files now come from one file, so the visible date and the structured data cannot drift apart.
The Ferrari quotation traced to its source
A new page traces the remark attributed to Enzo Ferrari to Gino Rancati's 1977 biography, sets out how the wording in circulation differs from the source, and separates it from Norman Dewis's account of a different remark at Geneva. Four passages which previously said no source had been found, on the history page, The Car, the designer page and the questions list, have been corrected.
XKE name cross-linked from the American pages
The XK-E or E-Type page now answers whether Jaguar ever made a car called the XKE, and the two American ownership pages link to it for readers who know the car by the American name.
Charging system article rewritten from Lucas sources
The charging system and alternator article has been rebuilt from the Lucas Fault Diagnosis Service Manual and Limora spare parts catalogues. It now names the Lucas C45, C42 and 11AC equipment fitted to each car, gives the Lucas test figures for each system, and notes where a supplier catalogue independently confirms a Lucas figure.
IndexNow, and real dates in the sitemap
The archive now supports IndexNow, the protocol Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo use to be told about a changed page at once rather than waiting to be crawled. The ownership key is served from the site root, and a private page submits either every URL in the sitemap or a single page that has just changed, reporting the exact status code and response it gets back. The sitemap also carries a last modified date for every page that genuinely has one: the review date held with each technical article, diagnostic tree, variant and identification topic, and for the remaining pages the date of the most recent changelog entry that names them. Pages with no corroborated date carry none.
Technical articles can carry photographs, and the first one does
The technical reference held thirty six articles and not one of them could show a picture: a block of body content could be a heading, a paragraph or a list, and nothing else. It can now be a figure as well, with a caption and a credit, rendered in the same style as the photographs on the rest of the archive. The first is on the inboard rear brakes article, where a photograph of a rear suspension cage out of the car shows the inboard calipers and the copper lines running out to remote bleed nipples, which is most of what that article spends several hundred words describing. It was supplied by Stephen Ruddick, the owner of TUK 129F, and used with his permission. Adding a photograph to any other technical article is now a one line change.
/technical/inboard-rear-brakes
Prompted by Stephen Ruddick.
Correction: a photograph wrongly captioned on the Series 1 2+2 page
The photograph below the for and against table on the Series 1 2+2 page was captioned as showing a remote brake bleed system. It did not. The owner of TUK 129F, whose photographs illustrate that page, spotted it and supplied the picture the caption actually belonged to: the rear suspension cage out of the car, with the inboard calipers visible and the copper lines running out to remote bleed nipples on the cage. The correct photograph is now in place. The original image has been kept and will be reinstated with an accurate caption once its subject is confirmed.
Prompted by Stephen Ruddick.
Inboard rear brakes rewritten
The inboard rear brakes article was rebuilt from named sources rather than general practice. It now covers the separate handbrake calipers, the Series 2 removal sequence, the caliper centring shims and the method for setting them, uneven pad wear, and why the handbrake is a separate problem from the service brakes. The placeholder source line was replaced with eight named sources, and four things the archive cannot establish are stated on the page.
Series 1 2+2 automatic gearbox identified
The automatic gearbox fitted to the six cylinder 2+2 is now established as the Borg Warner Model 8, named in the original Jaguar 2+2 brochure supplied by Stephen Ruddick. That item has been removed from the page's list of things it cannot establish.
Prompted by Stephen Ruddick.
Series 1 2+2 page updated
The Series 1 2+2 page was updated after Stephen Ruddick supplied his 1966 Daily Express Motor Show Guide source. The weight difference is given as 4.5 hundredweight, and the guide's 2+2 figure of 3,080lb agrees within ten pounds with this archive's kerb weight, so the remaining disagreement concerns the two seat coupe rather than the 2+2. The March 1966 introduction is confirmed as the official launch with production beginning earlier, the earliest known right hand drive car being FWK 136C of September 1965.
Prompted by Stephen Ruddick.
Series 1 2+2 page published
A new page on the Series 1 E-Type 2+2, built on notes supplied by Stephen Ruddick, the owner of TUK 129F. It covers the longer wheelbase, the first automatic E-Type, 1966 prices, and the case for and against buying one today, and it publishes two conflicting accounts of the weight difference rather than choosing between them.
Prompted by Stephen Ruddick.
Picture frame source named
The printed catalogue used to confirm the picture frame part numbers has been identified as Martin Robey's own E-Type catalogue and is now named. That sharpens the C15014 question: the same Martin Robey code, MRE92, appears against C15014 in their printed catalogue and against C25368 on their website.
Picture frame part numbers confirmed
The picture frame article's part numbers have been checked against a printed parts catalogue rather than supplier listings alone. The Series 1 crossmember is C15014 and the Series 2 is C28922. Series 1.5 was previously grouped with Series 2 and belongs with Series 1. The catalogue also uses the term picture frame in its own descriptions, which the article had recorded as unseen in any parts documentation.
Brake and clutch reservoirs
A new technical article on why reproduction brake and clutch fluid reservoir bottles crack at the outlet: the missing internal reinforcement, the fuel hose mistake, the correct EPDM hose and the widely misread Cohline part number.
The picture frame
A new technical article on the sheet steel crossmember at the front of the E-Type frame assembly: what it carries, why jacking damages it, where the car number is stamped, and how the name is often misapplied to the bulkhead. The bonnet-fit article was also corrected: the bonnet hinges from the front of the frame assembly, not from the front bulkhead.
Cross-site links reduced to one author credit
Links to the other archives the author writes were consolidated onto the author page, leaving a single quiet credit in the footer. An llms.txt file was added describing the archive and its sourcing rules for machine readers.
Page titles and descriptions shortened
Every page was crawled as rendered rather than read from source, and nine titles over sixty characters and fifty-eight descriptions over a hundred and sixty were rewritten. Pages needing a long heading and a short search title now carry both.
Storage, humidity and dehumidification
A new technical article on keeping an E-Type in a garage: where the disagreements over target humidity lie, how compressor and desiccant machines differ, what garage and floor construction does to moisture, and why idling a stored car is contested.
Site-wide search
Search moved from the technical hub and the questions page into the header, covering every substantive page. The index is assembled at build time from the same content the pages render from, so a new article appears in search without any further wiring.
Driving an E-Type through the winter
A new technical article on winter use rather than winter storage: salt exposure and underside washing, the water traps particular to this car, the coating families and what each costs you in access, and the conditions in which the car should stay in the garage.
Unearned source citations removed
Nineteen technical articles cited a Jaguar service manual for the 3.8 and 4.2 that had not been consulted, and six further pages cited a Heritage Trust research guide by issue number and date, likewise unread. Every one of those citations was removed. Where a claim rested on a false citation it was either reattributed to the source that actually supplied it, such as xkedata.com or the published marque press, or moved into an explicit unverified note. The how-to-read-this-archive page now states plainly that the archive works from published secondary sources and has not worked from the factory workshop manual.
The archive's own car documented
A page for 9769 HA, a 1963 Series 1 3.8 fixed-head coupe: its factory record, its ownership history, the restoration it received and what has been changed since. Photographs of the car followed the same day. It documents a car and does not offer one for sale.
Author page given a biography
The author page gained a biographical section and matching Person structured data, so a reader can judge who is writing and on what basis. A portrait was added shortly after.
FAQPage structured data on the questions page
The fifty questions were carrying Article structured data only, with the FAQPage markup missing. It was added, generated from the same question array the page renders, along with search and a live match count within the page.
Fifty questions, deduplicated and placed
Fifty questions people actually ask about the E-Type were written and grouped, then audited so that no question appeared twice and each topical answer sat on the page that owns the subject rather than being repeated.
Identification section
A hub with its own page for each of the four numbers an E-Type carries: why the car has no modern VIN, how chassis numbers are structured, what an engine number records, and why the body number matters on a monocoque.
Technical reference section
The technical articles were established as a searchable set built from one content array, covering the engine, running gear, brakes, cooling, electrics and bodywork, each with its own sources and its own record of what could not be verified.
The archive published
The first pages went up: the car itself, series identification, production numbers, the XK engine, restoration and the note on how to read the archive, together with the navigation, the hero photograph and the site's structured data.