Topic: Jaguar To Build Six 'Brand New' Lightweight E-Types

[Autos_Editor]

Only 12 Lightweights were built of intended 18-unit series in 1963

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[Railton]

Yup. Read that article yesterday here.
http://carbuzz.com/news/2014/5/14/Jaguar-is-Reviving-its-Classic-Lightweight-E-Type-7720312/

Railton

[HeliDriver]

Very cool, but I want more details.

So are they building these cars from scratch, or did they find some never-used old parts in a storage shed somewhere and are finally going to screw them together? If it's the former, I could see hand-building a new body from sheet aluminum, but are they really going to build new engines from scratch? For a production run of six?

Or are they just going to cannibalize a bunch of old E-Types for parts, refurbish them, maybe put a new body on it and call it new? Didn't Nissan do something like that with some old 240Zs a few years back?

[HeliDriver]

A tiny bit more information here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/motoring/33632/jaguars-lightweight-e-type-reborn.html

And, yes, it sounds like these really are going to be built from scratch. Crazy, but very impressive.

[Northernridge]

Yes, it is very enticing. And interesting in all kinds of ways. Car makers could use this 'PR stunt' for brand building efforts...why not produce a few limited runs of great cars from bygone eras and restrict the sale to qualified collectors to make sure the cars don't actually end up on the streets (don't meet emissions and safety requirements) and in the service bays of local dealers? Might be brilliant...more should try it. I liked the term 'continuation cars' from the article above.

[HeliDriver]

Oh yeah, never thought about the street-legal aspect of it. So these new cars aren't even going to be street legal?

I assume that just because the car will have a serial number from 1963 (whatever that means), that doesn't mean the authorities will actually see it as a 1963 car and license it as an antique.

But what if they actually have a few VIN plates that were stamped up back in 1963? Or what if they started a with a bare 1963 chassis with a VIN plate already on it? AFAIK, that would make the car officially a 1963 model, and officially street-legal even though it doesn't meet today's requirements.