You mean the re badged mondeo, right?
There's always one
Sorry I was being polite, that awful pile driven by by Hiyacinth Bucket types you mean.
It's a bloody mondeo. And a more rusty one at that usually, I believe?
The S type is not a Mondeo. The X type is the one that shares some of its underpinnings with the mundano.
The S type does suffer, like all Ford era Jags, from being, err, well, Ford. The gearboxes in particular are made of chocolate (more noticeable on V8 petrol and V6 diesel), as are the transfer boxes on 4WD ones.
S type seems to snap front springs like an Omega snaps rears. S type has quite a lot of electrical gremlin type problems - rarely serious enough to cause reliability concern, as these tend to be on ancilliary stuff like windows, entertainment etc.