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Several years ago at Spring Mountain Raceway in Nevada, I watched a young man blow the engine on his Quattroporte on his first lap. A good friend of mine had a fully loaded Ghibli sedan spend four months of its first year in the shop for repairs, and then with his family in the car traveling on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles while going 75mph, lost his braking system completely and had to use his emergency brake to stop the car and save his family. The next day that car was gone. I think the Gran Turismo is a great looking car with a usable back seat, but no car in the Maserati lineup has ever been confused with being reliable.
My Aston's have been as reliable as my Jags; just more expensive for routine service. Less (zero in my area) indy's to work on Aston is another kicker.
But the debate is specifically XKR vs DB9.
If you want to include that weird thing, although it looks kinda cool, you'd delve into Jaguar's bin and take out a C-X75, and that's ten years older than that new AM and doesn't cost $4.3 million, mostly cuz nobody can buy a C-X75.
I'm still on this topic personally. I'm going to be selling my x100 and likely replacing it wth a db9 or granturismo. Overall consensus with both is that you can get good reliability with good preventative maintenance but both platforms have niggles, like the xk.
They're like the x150, with shrivelly dashes, water pumps, duck bills and in isolated cases on the 5L, timing issues.
The GT had camshaft variators that would get oil starved prior to a design change that introduced a check ball in the front most cam cap unit to prevent oil draining on shutdown (solution is new variator if they're toast, machine and add check ball either way). That is overwhelmingly the biggest issue on early cars. Like Ferrari and apparently some XKs, they get sticky soft touch buttons that you can fix with elbow grease, less effort to do than shrinky dash leather but a hassle.
The DB9 got better over it's run; wth bumps in power each iteration. They did iterative changes that were nice. The early cars can suffer from oil starvation in the rear, a good bit from the dipstick being meh. The solution partially is a revised dipstick that adds oil to the capacity, the other bit is pay attention to the oil. They can also have coils go in early cars, a front timing cover seal and automatic transmission lines. coils are about a grand all in and really a minor deal overall. The timing cover seal is a bit of work. The transmission lines are ridiculous in price and if you take the old ones off and get the rubber sections replaced at a hydraulics shop, you'll be thousands ahead. They can also have leather shrinkage but it's less common mostly doing to lower car usage.
I think both are great cars in their competing segments. They remind me both of my x100 where there's known faults but they are ones that can just be fixed for good by owners. I think objectively the x150 is more reliable and the faults are less serious overall along with lower incidence rates of the isolated faults. I still want to dip my toes into an entry level exotic gt. If I couldn't have both my X150 and one of them, I'd stick wth my xk though.
08-14-2020 | 12:36 PM
