A reference archive
The Jaguar E-Type, written down properly
What the car is, how to tell the series apart, how many were built, how the engine works, and what it takes to keep one on the road. Free to read, with no advertising and nothing for sale.
Series 1 fixed-head coupe. The long bonnet, covered headlights and wire wheels are characteristic of the earliest cars.
This is an independent archive about the Jaguar E-Type, written and maintained by Jon Cosson, who owns a Series 1. It exists because the reliable answers turned out to be harder to find than they should be.
Much of what is genuinely known about these cars sits in forum threads, in club archives, and inside the editorial pages of firms whose real business is selling cars. This site tries to answer the question instead of selling you something.
It is written for owners and would-be owners: anyone trying to identify a car, understand how it works, or decide what a tired example needs next.
Free, and honest about its sources
The archive is free to read. It carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no sponsored content, and nothing on it is for sale.
Where a figure comes from a published source, that source is named in the text. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is set out rather than resolved by picking a favourite. Where something cannot be verified, the archive says so and points you at the people who hold the real answer. The standard aimed for throughout is that of a good workshop manual: specific, sourced, and honest about uncertainty.
What this archive covers
The subject is ownership: identification, the engineering, what goes wrong, and what keeping one on the road actually involves. The depth is on the six-cylinder cars: Series 1, the interim cars usually called Series 1.5, and Series 2. Series 3 and the V12 appear factually where they belong in the story, without being built out. The roadster, the fixed-head coupe and the 2+2 are covered within each page rather than separately.
- The car: the launch at Geneva in March 1961, Malcolm Sayer's body, and the shape of the model's life.
- Series identification: the covered headlights, flat floors and outside bonnet locks of the earliest cars, the move from 3.8 to 4.2, and the lighting and bumper changes that define Series 2. If you are trying to work out what is parked in front of you, start here.
- Production numbers: how many were built, answered once and in full, including the reasons published totals differ.
- The XK engine: the 3.8, the 4.2, the head, the carburettors, and what the unit is like to live with.
- Restoration: why a car's structure, rather than its paint, decides whether it is worth saving.
What this archive deliberately does not cover
There is nothing here about cars for sale, asking prices, what an E-Type is worth, market values, auction results or investment advice, and nothing about restomod or continuation builders. That ground is already held, thoroughly, by commercial sites whose pages rank first for those questions, and this archive concedes it on purpose. If you want to know what a particular car is worth, a specialist restorer, a marque valuer or an insurer with classic experience will serve you far better than a reference page could.