We were talking about this last weekend when we took the 34-year-old Jaguar XJ-S out for a Sunday run with some friends. Yes, yes, yes, it sucks up enough petrol to run a fleet of modern Kias, and yes, yes, yes it probably doesn’t do things as efficiently as a 2015 Hyundai.

But it does something those modern one-size-fits-all cars don’t do; it makes blokes my age drool. It has presence. Mrs Whacked says it’s a chap-magnet.

In its day, it was said to be the fastest V12-engined car in the world – in a straight line – and would pass just about anything except a service station.

It still oozes style, power and charm, and looks like nothing else on the road. It was equipped with almost every luxury, such as AM and FM radio, power steering, fuel injection, and a mirror in the glove box.

But … it has one shortcoming (okay, a few shortcomings, but for the purposes of this article, one in particular).

New, it cost about $45,000 which in today’s dollars is somewhere north of $120,000.

Today, you can get usable XJ-S cruisers for less than $10,000. That’s ridiculous. It’s still a very exotic, fascinating car which – I reckon – is a beautiful piece of industrial art. Its long, raking bonnet, very low two-door cabin, buttressed rear, wide stance and leather and timber interior are unique.

When you light up the internal fires, it rumbles in a rich-throated way. Like Telly Sevalas or Benjamin Netanyahu after drinking half-a-bottle of single-malt scotch, while modern cars sound like an asthmatic Ed Sheeran.

Granted when you look under the bonnet, it’s like someone put a hand grenade in a tub of metal and plastic spaghetti and slammed it shut before it went off. Details. Details.

No, the thing that puzzled us last weekend was that in a car which cost in its heyday the modern equivalent of a block of land in Strathfieldsaye, why could they not include cup holders?

Even the cheapest cars now coming out of India or China have cup holders, but not in the very early 80s British auto-exotica.

Didn’t the Poms drink tea, coffee or water when they were cruising the Lake District or sliding silkily along an autobahn? Were they so cool and stylish that they didn’t need liquid refreshments?

One of the stops on Sunday’s run was the top of Mt Tarrengower in Maldon … after we’d stopped in town to pick up some take-away coffee.

I was lamenting the lack of cup holders to a mate who was out in a very interesting, original Holden Kingswood ute, and he confessed he had the same problem – which he intended to solve in exactly the same way as the vehicle’s original owner had. He’d get his wife to hold the coffee while he drove to the top of the mountain and the look-out over the town.

I explained this to Mrs Whacked, who did not seem to be delighted at the idea of being used as a human cup holder.

When we got to the top, our ute-driving mate poked his head through the window to see how his low-tech solution had worked. Mrs Whacked was experiencing that unique inner warmth that only a hot latte in the lap can convey.

Our mate said the problem wasn’t the coffee.

“You need a new cup holder,” he suggested microseconds before he pulled his head out of the window and beat a very swift retreat.

WAYNE GREGSON