Why did Jaguar stop manufacturing the Coupe? I would love to have one.

 

For appearance alone it was one I always wanted at the time but had to settle for the four door for both practicality and cost.

Major issues were the rear quarter window winding mechanism and body flexing which caused serious wind noise around the front door glass seals. The longer and heavier doors also tended to sag even when new.

Jaguar engineering was at an all time low in the 1970's. This and the British Leyland internal battles effectively killed off this low volume, high cost model.

Graham

 

I'm not a "C" expert but, yeah, my impression is that production of this model was a multi-dimensional struggle every inch of the way.

Fortunately for us (and Jaguar) the 4-door models were far from shabby in the looks department so dropping the model from production wasn't too painful from an emotional standpoint and likely made tons of sense from a business standpoint.

Cheers
DD

 

Only about 5000 coupes were made in all. When I lived in Birmingham, a neighbour owned one and we went to a Jaguar rally in it, Sublime car, but not built very well. This was the 70s after all !! They suffer from serious rust in the sills below the rear side windows, due to lack, of drainage. There can't be many left now.

 

My understanding is that the success of the XJ6L and XJ12L killed the coupe. When they chose to stop production of the SWB sedan, so too went the coupe as it was a SWB sedan with 2 doors rather than 4.

 

What makes the coupe special also creates is weaknesses. The wind noise, the body flex, the build quality.

The wind noise is very noticeable because the rest of the ride is so quiet and refined. The pilliarless doors jam, thin A pillars and steep windshield angle leads to lots of green house flex.

The window sealing related wind noise is difficult to solve. I've spent hours and hours adjusting the windows and when you get the front right the rear leaks and vise-versa. Adjust a leak out of the top front then the bottom front leaks. Then I reinforced the back of the seal for a tighter fit and it's so tight the weak window motor can close the window. It's all very frustrating and not what a premium new car buyers would have wanted even in the mid 70's.

Build quality was also an issue. The spot welds on both of my doors were so irregular they prevented the seal from seating and created a large wind noise at the base of the door. Some treatment with a grinding disc flattened them out and let the seal do it's job. Seems to me Jaguar put its least experienced builders on the coupe protecting its bread and butter sedans.

Also at this time the XJS was being developed so the XJ coup was always doomed to fail because of under development. If you examine an XJS you can see how most of the XJC's short comings were addressed.