Car Number Collisions
We now have eight E-Types that between them only have four car numbers! In all four cases, there appears to be one legitimate contender and one pretender. However, outside of a lawsuit, there’s no way to really determine the answer to the question of authenticity. And the stakes are pretty high–I have heard in many European countries (and all four cases involve cars where one is in Europe and the other is in the States) having a car with a “faked” number might lead to it being crushed, without recompense. That may even be the case here in the states.
Frankly, I didn’t think anyone would go to this extent to “legitimize” their cars…plenty of craptacular project cars exist (even today) for modest amounts of money, an easy source of a “legitimate” car number and legal paperwork.
It presents a problem for us, as in how do we present such machines on the site? I really don’t need the owner of a car we label as the “pretender” pointing their lawyer guns this way. There are practical problems as well from a data managing perspective, but they pale before the legal aspects.
seems that the only way to resolve the issue here is to contact Jaguar archives and get as complete a history as possible on the cars in question and ascertain who is telling stories! If for example there is clear evidence through motor vehicle records in the US that the car was registered here new and has remained within the the US registration system continuously to the current date then it seems reasonable to expect that the car registered here is most likely to be the genuine article!I would suggest that until that time that both cars claiming the same registration # should be suspect! There are instances of some of the RARE jaguars sharing a serial # .. generally this has happened when the vehicle has been badly damaged and the parts scattered .. so someone gets the engine for example and “builds” a new body/chassis around it .. even recently tho there was an honest owner of a VERY rare Jag who did the honorable thing and gave up his car to see that htis trend was reversed.. at conciderable cost to himself I might add.
Comment by godfrey miller — October 23, 2006 @ 9:16 pm
The problem may not necessarily be pretender cars. The way the website obtains information on cars is suspect. Car information is routinely downloaded from other websites by non-owners without permission. There’s bound to be a lot of mistakes in the information received because it is not verified by the car owners. For example, check out car number 680437 on XKDATA.COM. This car is listed as a Fixed Head Coupe when it is obviously an Open Two Seater. I’ve noticed that a number of sellers on EBAY no longer provide Chassis Numbers for XKs or XKEs presumably to prevent unauthorized appearances on this website.
Comment by Mike Balch — October 24, 2006 @ 6:35 pm
Mike, the eight cars in question all have the number stamped on the dataplate–as in, people have phoned back and forth and are concerned enough to consider legal action.
The XK you mention is listed that way in an auction report…it might be a conversion, the auction report may be wrong. But it’s out there as such and the person who uploaded it is simply reporting what they found. There’s nothing preventing anyone from correcting the information. And there’s plenty of precedent for conversions, there are several on this site and indeed there was just a series of articles in one of the magazines about restoring an XK150 FHC to DHC form, so the fact that the car you mention is an open car means the possibility of conversion can’t simply be dismissed out of hand.
The permission comment eludes me. This site is only as good as the information input, sure, but want to take a random stab how many cars would exist on a site exclusively for the owners of these cars? About same as the number of people, I would guess, who have added themselves as “owners” here, about 300. I frankly don’t get the proprietary attitude, but folks who don’t like the site don’t have to visit.
Comment by roger — October 24, 2006 @ 7:39 pm
There are very many cars entered here in the UK which are conversions - auto to manual, LHD to RHD and 2+2 to OTS (not so common, but by no means only a handful). I think there is some funny business going on with the pretender owners - and probably the European end of things. Most likely it happened during the mad classic boom years a decade or more ago. This is not *necessarily* malicious in the sense that not only do all kinds of wrecks get imported to form the basis for rebuilds, but wrecks without papers, wrecks with wrong papers etc. All the more reason for this fine site to keep track. Thank you for your efforts Roger.
Comment by Pete Crespin — October 25, 2006 @ 2:00 am
Interesting discussion. There can be logical explanations for the collisions and anomalies, as have been posed. I believe the cognocenti are aware that Coventry made numbering errors too, some well documented by JDHT. The hope would be that if there are malicious forgeries, a big if, posts and discussions like these on this site will be the vehicle that protects buyers and owners. Fact is without this website we wouldn’t know these collisions and anomalies existed so shall we shoot the messenger? Of course JDHT can also sort these out but they’re not free, not public, only available owners and if you’re not a Jag person you have no clue what JDHT is.
Comment by pauls — October 25, 2006 @ 4:01 am