Afternoon all.

A quick note to say that I’ll probably be frequenting the forum less in the future, having made a momentous decision yesterday.

From other posts you may know my 2017 405 (4.4AB) was troublesome which culminated in an effective rejection of the car.

It was scheduled to be replaced by a 2018 4.4 AB, ordered in November last year and at the time of ordering it expected to arrive mid to late February for a March registration. But like other have experienced, the date just kept on moving out.

I really enjoyed the FF experience and one of the reasons we got one was to accommodate our two retired racing greyhounds. Sadly we lost one to cancer in mid January so to an extent the “head” justification for the FF was diminished.

This combined with the continual outward movement of delivery dates got me looking/ thinking and I started to look at the Velar D300 First Edition as an alternative.

The big thing was on the configuator the Velar came out at the thick end of £85k compared to £108k for the FF. As I am purchasing on pcp, the residual values are important and in summary, although the Velar is £23,000 less on headline price, at the end of 3 years the GMV is only £4K less than the FF. So the Velar would be worth £48k down from £85k ( down £37k) against the FF at £52k from £108k (down £56k).

Upshot here is that the first edition Velar cost is less than 30% of the payment for the FF even though the headline cost of each car is much nearer.

I took a Velar out yesterday for a test drive, hating the first few miles as it seemed really claustrophobic at first. However we had the car for around 6 hours and the more we drove it the more we liked it.

Sure, it doesn’t have the sense of occasion, smoothness and general feeling of well being you unquestionably get in the FF. but it’s not exactly a shed either!

We returned to the dealer and have cancelled our AB in favour of a D300 First Edition Velar, which the dealer has on call - down and will be up our drive on early March.

I have my eyes open about possibile infotainment issues again, the Velar forum has many tales of woe. However as the same unit is now in the FF, RRS and I believe some other Jaguar products, I do have confidence that they will make it work properly and reliably as it’s too important a feature to too many of their products.

I still have a soft spot for the FF and will look in from time to time, but obviously from now I’ll be spending more time on the Velar forum.

Thanks to you all for the fun over the past year and to you, Stan, for running a well managed, friendly and helpful forum site.

I wish you well and for your circumstances it would be hard to resist your logic, so I'm sure you'll be happy with your new purchase.  2016 SDV8 Autobiography
And several others previously.

Good Luck Fat and i hope the dogs likes it as much as you.
Sorry to hear about the other dog.

Enjoy your new car, I'm sure it'll still be fantastic - Although like caymanblack, I think forget the FFRR, just really sorry to hear about the pooch. Nothing worse than loosing a dear friend!

Hope all goes well and I went through the same type of soul searching when it came to look at another vehicle.
I really do hope you enjoy your new car and that I have made the right decision on getting another.
All the best
Steve

The Velar is a great looking car, they seem very popular here in Andorra and I’m becoming increasingly drawn towards one.

Thanks guys for all the good wishes and dog comments.

Alistair wrote:

The Velar is a great looking car, they seem very popular here in Andorra and I’m becoming increasingly drawn towards one.