#Jaguar F-Type roadster – an annotated graphic

Five decades? Really? Five decades since the E-Type Jag ignited the burning legend of the Swinging Sixties? If celebrities of the time weren’t zipping around “town” to the Bag O’Nails in their Austin Minis, they were racing out to the rarefied country estates of the artistic aristocracy in their Jaguar E-Types.

Described by none other than Enzo Ferrari as “the most beautiful car ever made” – and, let’s be fair, Enzo knew a thing or two about beautiful cars – the E-Type Jag was a sleek, cigar-shaped futuristic driving dream. 70,000 lucky souls lived that dream between 1961 and 1974, when production ceased.

Now Jaguar brings us the F-Type. See what they did there? Visually, it’s clearly a modern Jaguar, rather than a vintage throwback, but that’s what people expect for their £80,000 these days. With a top-end 5.0 litre V8 engine option, this Jag literally won’t hang about for long.

Click on the graphic for an expanded view.

Jaguar F-Type

European car makers fear sales decline – an annotated graphic

In the topsy-turvy world of car manufacturing, seems like everyone apart from the Germans is facing a grim future. Sales in Western Europe are apparently closing in on 20-year lows, at least as far as the new car registrations statistics suggest.

However, all is not doom and gloom, as E&T news has reported this week. New car sales in the UK actually increased by 11.5 per cent last month, official figures showed. There was also the story that radical plans have been announced to install electric vehicle charging points every 50 miles on Scottish trunk roads. And looking even further ahead, a Government-industry joint report suggested that up to 1.6 million hydrogen-powered cars could be on UK roads by 2030.

As ever with news, it’s how you look at it. The volume of the glass is 50 per cent occupied, one way or the other.

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Europe’s auto crisis?

Nissan car factories in Mexico – an annotated graphic

Nissan is to invest close to $2 billion to build a third factory in Mexico, taking the Japanese car maker’s  total capacity to more than one million vehicles. Nissan built approximately 600,000 vehicles in Mexicon last year.

Back in the UK, the Nissan car plant in Sunderland set a new production record in 2011, building a total of 480,485 vehicles, as reported by E&T recently.

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Mexico auto industry: new Nissan factory