Who said the British and the French and the Americans don't get on? Maybe it's different in the political corridors but the scene in the English Midlands last Friday was one of goodwill and affability and quite a bit of back-slapping too, and it all seemed so genuine!
The three nationalities - the British and the Americans from Ford and Jaguar, and the French from PSA or Peugeot and Citroën - were making a celebratory announcement: Jaguar is getting a diesel engine at last.
Ford is Jaguar's parent and it has been able to leapfrog ahead in the diesel technology stakes through its five-year old alliance with PSA, producing accomplished 1.4, 1.6 and 2.0-litre engines in the volume segments. Friday's announcement was that bit more significant because Jaguar, without a diesel, was finding its sales in Europe seriously affected. Among its competitors, diesel sales account for 64 per cent of Audis, 55 per cent of Mercedes-Benz and 46 per cent of BMW.
The new engine is a 24-valve turbocharged V6 that has the latest common-rail direct-injection fuel system. It develops 207 bhp which is 11 bhp less than the latest BMW 3.0-litre going into the new 530d. However, it offers 32 bhp more than the competitive Mercedes offering, the 2.7-litre turbodiesel that's very familiar in the E-Class. We will have to wait until this time next year to experience the new unit in the S-Type, but before that there will be an X-Type diesel, using a version of the Ford Mondeo's 2.0-litre four-cylinder power unit.
The new 2.7-litre V6 diesel will be built at the Ford Dagenham plant which built many of the Fords of yesteryear for Britain and indeed Ireland. There's no car production there any more: Dagenham is what Ford loftily calls its "global centre of excellence for diesel engineering". This Dagenham engine will also go into other members of Ford's prestige grouping like Land Rover and Volvo as well as the larger cars of the Peugeot and Citroën partners.
So who did what in terms of development? Jean-Martin Folz, the PSA boss, told us that while his company brought the 1.4, 1.6 and 2.0-litre engines to Ford, Ford was the leader on the V6. "We had 150 people from both companies working on the joint project."
It is a partnership that is powered by the rise and rise of diesel, not just in the prestige segments either. The percentage of diesel-powered cars in Europe has more than doubled since 1993, from 20 per cent to over 40 per cent in 2002. The Ford/PSA partnership, with a €2 billion investment, envisages more than 10,000 diesel engines a day, in Britain and France. By next year, more than 35 different models will have engines from the partnership, rising to 50 in 2006.
The Ford president, Sir Nick Scheele, who hasn't been having the best of times recently, beamed happily: "I think we are in a win/win strategy here."