Jaguar E-Type Production Figures

The figure most often printed is Jaguar's. When the E-Type was withdrawn, Jaguar gave Motor Sport its production split by market, and the magazine opened with it:

Jaguar's four market figures add up to that total exactly. The share is another matter: the same figures put 60,264 cars abroad, which is 83%, by our arithmetic. The "fourteen years" ran to 1975, when the last cars were registered; building had stopped in June 1974.

The other totals in print:

Two more stand, with their sources, in the production chart on the chassis numbers page: the XKEdata register's count of cars built, the only total broken down by series, body and steering side, which comes to 69 cars fewer than Jaguar's; and a figure Motor Sport gave in April 1989, without a breakdown, in a paragraph that also dates the last car to the autumn of 1974, months too late.

The whole spread is 77 cars, about one in a thousand. This site writes "about 72,500".

Jaguar numbered the E-Type in separate runs, one for each series, body and steering side, so the span of each run is a count of the numbers it used. The XKEdata register gives a count of cars built for each run; it does not say where its counts come from, but every one agrees with the Trust's span to within one car, and in 12 runs it is exactly one fewer, which looks like a difference in counting the ends, not in cars.

The Series 1 4.2 rows include the late cars now called "Series 1½". Paul Skilleter's book table, which Motor Sport quoted in 1989, gives the 3.8's runs within one car of the register's. One run carries a caution: Anders Clausager's table, as the Jaguar Clubs of North America print it, counts 936 right-hand-drive 3.8 roadsters, with a note that seven numbers in that run were not built and were used later for the Lightweight's continuation series. The same run holds the numbers of the original Lightweights. The car numbers page gives every run's first and last number.

By the register's count, the open two-seater was the commonest body, with 33,996 built in all four series, against 20,297 coupés, which ended with the Series 2, and 18,222 of the 2+2. Left-hand-drive cars came to 58,385, four in five of the whole, and right-hand-drive cars to 14,130.⁠source 1​source 3​source 7​source 6​source 8

Each series's page sets Jaguar's own figure beside the register's. The two kinds of source agree to within a few dozen cars for every series, and neither is exact. Jaguar's 1975 list uses three verbs, "sold" for the 3.8 and "built" or "constructed" for the rest, and its Series 2 dates run to 1971, an American model year: the last Series 2 cars were numbered in October 1970, and some late American ones carry a 2R prefix inside the ordinary runs, so they are not counted twice.

The "Series 1½" is the hardest to count, because it was never a factory series. The register counts it from the open-headlamp change of 1967, which Jaguar's bulletins date by car number; counted instead from the American cars' Zenith-Stromberg carburettors, which began at the numbers in the Trust's "September 1967" row, it comes to a few hundred fewer cars. The Series 2 page explains the name.⁠source 2​source 3​source 1​source 9

These are Jaguar's figures as Motor Sport printed them in 1975, "only 12,320 being retained for home consumption", and the shares are our arithmetic. About two in three E-Types went to the United States, nearly 71 in 100 to North America. Jaguar's figures say where the cars went over the whole run; in a single year the share could be higher, and Denis Jenkinson reported in April 1971 that 78% of the new V12s were going to America.

The register's steering-side counts make a cross-check. Suppose every American, Canadian and British car was built with its market's steering. Then about 6,900 left-hand-drive cars and about 1,800 right-hand-drive cars remain for the other export markets, 8,724 in all against Jaguar's 8,793: a difference of 69 cars, exactly the gap between the two sources' totals, by our arithmetic. The two counts reconcile to the car.

The around the world page says what the export cars were, and Jaguar XKE tells the American story.⁠source 2​source 3​source 10

The Jaguar Heritage Trust gives the first car number of each year in every run, so the numbers issued in each calendar year can be worked out, run by run. The result below is our arithmetic, and it counts numbers, not finished cars. The Trust itself calls its change points approximate, a guide only.

The rows add up to the 72,527 numbers issued. The 1965 and 1966 rows rest on the year table of Alan Karpovitch, in the Jaguar Clubs of North America's judges' guide, which also marks seven numbers in 1963 and two in 1965 as allocated but never built.

In 1969, the first full year of the Series 2, Jaguar numbered more E-Types than in any other year, and left-hand-drive roadsters were the largest single part of it. From the summer of 1973, when the last 2+2 cars were built, the roadster carried the car alone.⁠source 1​source 9​source 11

Jaguar's own service bulletins, as the Jaguar Clubs of North America reproduce them, give the first two. The outside bonnet latches were fitted to the first 91 right-hand-drive and 385 left-hand-drive roadsters and the first four and 20 coupés, and moved inside in October 1961; every one of those cars also had the flat floor, which ended with the footwells of early 1962. The 1961 E-Type tells their story. Of the last 50 roadsters, 49 were black and one green.

Some counts are not published at all. No source read gives the number of automatics built, though each carries the letters BW after its car number. The six-cylinder Series 3 was announced in 1971 but "only one example was ever built specifically as such", Motor Sport wrote in 1975, "though at least three more were converted from V12s in the Jaguar Experimental Department". The last 2+2 cars were numbered in July 1973 for left-hand drive and August for right; the last roadsters, and the last E-Type, in June 1974.

On 15 October 2026 the XKEdata register held entries for more than a third of the cars it counts as built. That is a register's count of cars someone has recorded, not a census of survivors, but it shows how many of these cars are still known by their numbers.⁠source 8​source 2​source 4​source 12​source 1​source 3