Daimler DS420 Various sales illustrations


Daimler DS420 Various sales illustrations

This web page shows various illustrated sales materials, that could not be included in other pages of this web site. All pictures can be viewed in a larger format by clicking on them.

The beautiful black limo illustration (J11DOV) is from the Jaguar calendar of December 1998.

The 1996 calendar was entirely devoted to the Daimler marque, celebrating the 1896-1996 jubilee. Its November illustration (red limo) shows the last DS420 ever built (L420YAC). The JDHT added it to its collection; a photograph of the same car is on the "Production & prices" page of this web site. The scetch in the background shows The Council House, Earl Street, in the centre of Coventry.

Finally, the yellow illustration is the July/August print of the 1992 calendar. The car shown (WOM366T, a 1978 model) is in the collection of the Coventry Transport Museum. The drawing was inspired by a 1968 press photograph (compare both illustrations). This illustration was re-used as the cover image for the Classic Parts / JDHT CD-ROM shown elsewhere on this site.

The original size of these drawings is 41×51 cm. approx.

The Kenning Motor Group owned the Jaguar/Daimler dealership Kenning's Car Mart in Manchester. Around 1981 they published a DS420 brochure of their own. It is extremely rare.

Several pages were taken from a 1981 factory sales brochure, but two pages were devoted to photos and a description of a limo built to very special specifications of one of their customers. This car had the central division removed to create an even greater impression of space inside.

Size A4, folded & stapled. Printed by The Nuffield Press, a division of BL, who also printed all factory brochures.

This undated leaflet was published by Hatfields, Sheffield's Jaguar dealer. Their address is still the same today as it was then.

The text mentions separate front seats, which dates this leaflet in 1984 or later. Dralon upholstery and a refrigerator in the boot, also mentioned in this text, were offered from 1985 on. The slogan The Uniquely British Limousine was also used as the title for a 1986 factory brochure. The rubber block bumpers as shown were on the car until 1987.

The most surprising detail is that the occasional seats are listed as "an optional extra". This is clearly a mistake.

This is the pre-print sheet of a magazine advertisement, accompanied by a "With Compliments" slip of the advertising company who made it for Jaguar Cars Ltd.

The text states a price of £ 27,995.- which was the catalogue price from October 1984 until July 1985. One year later this photograph was reused on the cover of a 1986 sales brochure which is extremely rare to find.

The text mentions that "there are now individual front seats with headrests", emphasising this recently added feature.

Reports on the 1977 Motorfair show in London, from the VandenPlas employees magazine Carriagecraft. The first article was taken from the October 1977 issue, during the show. The second one is from the December 1977 issue: 8 limousines sold, and 12 orders under negotiation!

The magazine copies were provided by Bryan Peebles, archivist of the VandenPlas Owners' Club.

Carriagecraft was the in-house magazine for the employees of the VandenPlas works in Kingsbury. Only three issues were ever published. Bryan Peebles, archivist of the VandenPlas Owners' Club supplied these copies.

The front page article in December 1977 looks back on the sales results for that year. It was the year of the Royal jubilee in Britain. Many orders for royalty from all over the world are mentioned with pride. And the sky for 1978 looks bright, with several more royal orders in the pipe line.

All three issues of the magazine had an article that tried to show how the sales figures and the stock figures for the year had developed. In the first article the author drew a bar chart of the sales figures, with an appropriately tick-marked vertical axis, but he/she also wrote the stock figures inside the bar drawing, at the bottom. Obviously, this led to complaints about incomprehensibility. The second issue saw a retry, but only to make things worse: both the sales figures and the stock figures got their own bars, superimposed on top of each other with different tick marks drawn on two vertical axes: one axis on the left side and one on the right side of the drawing. An icon of amateuristic graph presentation. Then, in the last issue, the obvious solution was found: don't try to cram two different things in one graph. Click on any one of the small pictures to see all three together in enlarged format. They make up for interesting reading.

The bar charts in the various articles show four different figures alltogether. First the average weekly sales, and the monthly sales. Although the caption inside the graph says that the monthly sale figures are for limousines and hearses together, the last article explicitly says that the total sales were 128 limos and 31 hearses. But the figures in the chart add up to 127. Somebody in the sales department lacked a sense for numbers here. Also, the numbers differ somewhat from the numbers shown on my "production figures, prices and options" page.

Then we have the figures for the stock levels. Since the DS420 actually had no stock at all (customers had to wait up to 12 month!) this figure almost exclusively shows the number of hearse bodies currently being converted, plus some units in transit between factory and customers.

The Master Sales Contract (MSC), mentioned in the last article only, is an interesting figure. It projects the estimates of the sales department onto the production department. This MSC adds up to a total of 323 for the year 1978: this is what the sales department plotted as their target, and effectively "ordered" the production department to provide. But: by the end of 1978 the actual sales were 139 limos and 48 hearses, which means that Jaguar and VandenPlas obviously had a serious commercial problem among them. A few month later the plug was pulled and VandenPlas ceased to exist as a separate company. The constant lament on the shortage of incoming bodies tells it all.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	total
Avg. weekly sale	4	3	3	4	3.5	2	3	1	1	3	-	-
Monthly sale	15	13	14	12	15	8	9	6	6	11	11	7	127
1977 Stock	28	47	45	36	35	23	18	18	18	20	-	-
1978 MSC	27	26	25	22	26	28	19	32	23	30	38	27	323

Along came 1978.

Again from the Carriagecraft magazine the New Year's speech from a Vanden Plas' spokesman: "It can hardly be denied that 1977 was a very bad year, not only for Leyland in general, but also for Vanden Plas itself. Our production achievement was lower than it has been for a number of years, with the Limousine falling to almost the lowest achievement against contract in the entire Leyland range". The "page 5" mentioned in this article is the rightmost of the three graphs shown here above.

The article ends with the non-prophetic words: "There is no doubt that we had our backs forced against the walls in 1977, but 1978 should be the year that we start pushing forward again".

At the end of the year thereafter, Vanden Plas ceased to exist...

The next two images show a list of Jaguar dealers in the UK, 1988. In this year, the DS420 was almost at the end of its commercial life time. The interesting thing of this illustration is that it shows how exclusive a limousine dealership was amongst the Jaguar distributors: only these five out of a list of over 200 had this status.

Both Thomas Startin and Wilcox were hearse builders, besides being limousine dealers. Wilcox Limousines still has a lot of activity in DS420, as can be seen on their web site (a reference is on the Web Links page of my site).
Stratstone was undoubtedly the most famous of all Daimler dealers; most of the DS420 limousines were sold via this company.
A 1986 sales brochure (present elsewhere on this web site) shows the company logo of Taggarts of Glasgow.
In a 1968 magazine article, i.e. 20 years earlier, the full list of limousine dealers is significantly different. But even the "Such Rare Distinction" advert shown higher on this webpage, dating from four years before this dealers' list, has nine instead of five DS420 dealers.

Around 1984-1986 this illustration was used in many sales brochures (see these brochures). Here it is shown as a wall poster, for showroom decoration purposes. The poster measures 20"×30" (51×76cm.).
For a good impression of this it is pictured together with a well known reference object.

Daimler Hire (bought by Hertz in 1958) was famous for supplying the rows of limousines for various state occasions in the UK. This 1970 Tariff List, showing car AMU308H, causes the usual surprising effects when you look back at price figures from several decades ago. E.g.: Chauffeur's board and lodging costs £.s.d. 3.10.0 per day...
Orig. size 19×14 cm.

The photos to the left (click to enlarge) were made for a magazine article in the early seventies. The rightmost one shows -most probably- the Daimler Hire Garage, on Herbrand Street in London. I would appreciate if somebody could confirm or correct this. It could be Avis Rent a Car on Headfort Place in London, because Avis had at least as much, if not more DS420 limos as Daimler Hire had. Another possibility would be Camelot Cars, who had over 20 limos.

If more documentation becomes available, the Daimler Hire Company would merit a page of its own on this web site.

In 1986 the Daimler marque existed 90 years. To commemorate, Jaguar had the Automobile Quarterly Magazine prepare a jubilee booklet, which came out especially beautiful. The booklet has wonderful colour photographs of many Daimlers, and lots of other historic information and illustrations. One of the pages shows the Office Car DS420 limousine, although it here has a different license plate (A930KHP) than on one of the press photographs elsewhere on this site (this site has an entire web page devoted to the office car). 21×26 cm, 42 pages, ISBN 0-915038-49-8, Princeton Publishing Inc.

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