Confessions of a Car Addict: Jaguar XJ40

I have in my garage a cardboard box containing an instrument dial pack. It cost £25, the advert emphatically noting that it didn’t work. Purchasing it was the prompting of a man from Nottinghamshire, who said such items are hard to come by now, and worth buying just for the spares they contain within.

I do, in fact, have an example of the car to which an instrument pack like this could be attached – I once bought a new-old stock radio housing for a car that I had yet to own, knowing there was a strong chance that this item might have been butchered – but I don’t need it. Yet. (I did buy an example of the Alfa Romeo Alfetta that might have needed the radio housing, but as it turned out, it never did.)

The dial pack in question is for a first series Jaguar XJ40, these cars having a mix of analogue dials – speedo and tacho – and digital bar-graph vacuum fluorescent displays that glow a ghostly green. It’s a bit of a visual mash-up, in truth, but in 1986 this was state of the art. Or state of one art, at least. Along with a confusingly elaborate, button-festooned trip computer of startlingly little use, these features were among the more visible signs that Jaguar had entered the modern age.