Jaguar X-Type, X-Factor? It's a no from us.

The Jaguar X-Type isn't a terrible car; it's just that nobody was fooled about what it actually was when it hit showrooms in 2001. Plenty of cars share their underpinnings with something far more humble - the Audi TT is a SEAT Altea, and the Saab 9-3 is a Vauxhall Vectra to give but two examples - but something about a Jag actually being a Mondeo, that consummate rep-mobile, struck an uncomfortable nerve with the car buying public.

Jaguar was merely trundling along in the late 1990s, with Ford seemingly not clear about what it should do with the luxury brand it had acquired in 1989. Being a huge multinational carmaker, though, it did have the nous to realise it had a half decent brand image on its books. And it also realised that people liked to buy cars called 'compact executives'...

'Aha,' Ford thought, 'we shall build a small Jaguar'. Unfortunately, the car it unveiled in 2001 was a retro pastiche too far. It was four-wheel or front-wheel drive in a rear-drive segment, old-fashioned and cramped. It took two years to get a diesel out and three for an estate, and by the time they did come the X-Type was already dead on its feet because few people wanted the tarted-up Mondeo when the casual one was just as good, but much cheaper. Poor sales were a given, and the X-Type clambers on, facelifted to the hilt and surreptitiously concealed behind rows of XFs in Jaguar showrooms.

Mark Nichol