Return to DrJohnWright's garage

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Published on 11 May 2019

Wonderful to hear from you, Robbo, and thank you for the feedback. It is true that many testers fail to comment on headlights. As carnut-73 observes, some journalists do not spend enough time with a car to pass a thorough judgement. I have always thought that members of the motoring press who own no car themselves have no steady benchmark. Back in 1983-85, I had a gorgeous BMW 3.0S. It provided me with a great basis for rating new cars, which I was then testing at the rate of more than one a week. The only car that was (marginally) better overall was the Jaguar XJ Series III Sovereign, which was, of course, a much later model; later I owned several of them, with the one I loved most being the Sebring Red car shown below. The 1983 Jaguar and the 1973 Bee-Emm both had three-speed automatics at the time four-speeders were becoming the norm (albeit slowly). Back to the Austin X6 though, it was my generally positive experience with the 1800 Mark II that predisposed me to consider buying one. The 1800 cruised happily at 75 miles per hour and I quite understand how superior the X6 would have been; I think it would have had considerably taller gearing. I owned my 1970 Camino Gold 1800 for a little less than a year in 1972-73, somewhat unwisely selling it in favour of a pale blue 1966 Fiat 1500 Mark III.