Junkyard Find: 2000 Jaguar S-Type
Not long ago, we had a Lincoln LS Junkyard Find, and, of course, that means that we need to take a look at the Jaguar counterpart to this mostly-forgotten Jag-O-Lincoln: the S-Type.
It’s no sweat finding a junkyard S-Type these days, particularly when you look in a high-inventory-turnover San Francisco Bay Area yard, and so here’s a not-very-hooptie example I saw last month.
The front of this car looks quite British, but the rear sure has a lot of ’92 Crown Vic-ness going on.
You could get an S-Type or an LS with a manual transmission in the United States, provided you got the V-6 engine. This 281-horsepower AJ-V8 DOHC engine was connected to a 5-speed Ford automatic.
The leather is worn, but the wood still looks nice. It might be fun to buy a good-running Lincoln LS and swap the S-Type’s interior into it.
Twenty-first-century Jags have endured some rough depreciation. We haven’t had an S-Type in the 24 Hours of LeMons yet, but we just saw our first X-Type a few months ago (it blew up within minutes of the green flag).
The V-8 S-Type listed at $48,000 in 2000, or about 66 grand in inflation-adjusted dollars.
The TV ads were high-buck/quid affairs.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
Agree I always liked these Jaguars. Drop a small block V-8 GM engine with a GM automatic and these would be a fairly reliable vehicle. A nice fuel injected 350 V-8.
The fun version of this was the S-type R produced in 2002 (for how long, I'm not sure). It had the 4.2 litre V8 with an Eaton supercharger on top, making 400 horses. It felt very fast to me. Lots of brawny power on tap, and very quick to get going. Sometimes I think about finding another one. In 2000, though, I had a loan of an S-type with the normal V8. At the time, it felt pretty grand inside. I gave my in-laws a ride to dinner, and my mother-in-law went out pretty much the next day and bought one. Well, she's still driving it! The reliability issues total two: a wiring glitch re the door lock (easy fix) and a transmission rebuild (not cheap). Otherwise all solid. I drove it once a year or two ago and it had lost a lot of the glam and grandness. But it felt good, just the same, to pilot it around. That damnedJaguar hood ornament still helps.