Good question, of course you will allways get, its a Ford/Jaguar, because Ford own Jaguar (at the moment) But the Jaguar Enthusiast Club have written quite a bit regarding the S Type, right from the launch. As far as I've understood the situation it is that the car is Jaguar designed, Or Jaguar/Ford designed. The one part that I seem to remember as not being original is the Three litre bottom end, which I understood as being Lincoln. You've got me interested here, I'm going to dig our my J.E.C. back copies!

Cheers,
Ed.

 

The base chassis is very probably Ford/Lincoln and modified by Jaguar but this doesn't mean that the S-Type dynamics can't be entirely down to Jaguar. The handling, ride & roadholding of a car are down to it's suspension design & layout - the only chassis related parts of this are where they actually mount, although this is relatively easy to change for a given existing chassis (and as far as I can tell not terribly important overall.)

So while it's likely that there are great overlaps in floorpan between the LS & S-Type (positions of transmission tunnel, seat mounting points etc) the cars will be completely different beasts dynamically and no-one need worry over how Ford their Jag is (although I suspect there's a lot of parts designs (both mech & electronic) that get loaded into the CAD package have the Ford badge swapped for a Jaguar one and resaved!

 

When the S first came out it was attacked for being very Ford on a Lincoln chassis because the Lincoln LS used before Jaguar. I've since heard and been told that it was Jaguar, not Ford or Lincoln who did ALL the work on this chassis, hense the reason why it is so good. Thinking about it logically Jaguar were always second to none when it came to chassis design.

 

According to Jeff Daniels book "Jaguar - the Engineering story" (ISBN 1 84425 030 X) the S- Type shares the "underframe and crash structure" with the Lincoln LS. This is probably just the base of the monocoque which doesn't really count as a chassis as you then have to bolt on the suspension and running gear etc before it could really be termed a chassis. Unfortunately the Jaguar archive doesn't contain much recent material about current models.

Certainly Ford and Lincoln would have had a hand in the design of the platform but I expect Jaguar would have had a say in matters if the platform was to be used for the S- Type. After that just about everything other body panel would have to be unique to the S- Type otherwise they would look the same.

Same applies to the V6 engine which shares the block and crankshaft with the Ford Duratec but beyond that everything else is Jaguar designed.

 

the early years

when the s-type was first introduced it was shared design and componentry with the lincoln ls.

At 2002.5MY jaguar made a number of improvements, new interiors, engine (2.5) new zf 6 speed autobox, new suspensions and of course introduction of s-type r. From that day forward what a brilliant car!

Trainerbloke