German Car Forum

Within a month or two the ink will have dried on the sale of Jaguar (and Land Rover) to India's Tata, thus unraveling two more of Ford's trans-Atlantic alliances. The timing is comic, as it coincides with almost the exact moment Jaguar has gotten its shit together. The new XF sedan goes on sale in March as Jag's first no-excuses contender in the mid-size luxury sedan segment since the MkII of 1959-'67. Born of the company's deep soul searching and back-against-the-wall determination, the XF is the best-handling Jaguar of all time. You're welcome, Tata.

Jaguar's past ten years have been rough. Overtly retro-styled cars and hopeful entry-luxury experiments chipped away at the brand's prestige, to the point that it was forced to run $700 monthly leases on the flagship XJ. Jaguars, under Sir William Lyons, were beautiful, athletic, avant-garde cars. Under Ford and late styling boss/all-around good guy Geoff Lawson, Jags became sad mockeries of themselves. Their slavish allegiance to the past struck chords in Palm Beach and other places where dinner is served at 4:30, but Jag's cool Britannia allure and musk-scented driver-owners — its Steve McQueens and Austin Powerses — had abandoned it. The new, Ian Callum–penned XK coupe and convertible reasserted the core ethos of the brand and brought grace, pace, and space (okay, not very much of that last one) into the current era, albeit to a small-volume segment.



According to Callum, the XF should be thought of as a four-door, higher-volume XK — a beautiful, athletic, avant-garde car that arrives at its Jaguarness not through the aping of old styling tropes, but by careful reinterpretation of them. "The design of the XF was derived from a set of first principles," Callum says. "Any similarities to other cars are purely coincidental." Which is to say, Please ignore its resemblance to the Lexus GS. In fairness, Callum's foundation for Jag's visuals probably aren't all that different from Lexus's recently reestablished ones: Flowing lines, purity, proportion, and, tying it all together, modernity.

Without copying any lines, Callum took essential bits of Jaguar styling history and re-imagined them. The new face, for example, dispenses with the mons veneris front end of the S-type and picks up where the 1968 XJ6's left off. The grille is squared off and mesh-laced; the iconic four round lights (big ones on the outside, small ones on the inside) are set behind clear lenses rather than into the sheetmetal, but the hood is still fluted around them as in the old XJ. The MkII shows up, too — its short overhangs and elegant, swooping side glass inspired the XF's soft corners and tapered greenhouse. Throughout the clay-modeling phase, Callum says that he was constantly going into the design studio and removing extraneous swage lines, no matter how much it pissed off the person who'd spent hours putting them there. "The car needed to look as disciplined as an E-type. It had to have that pure, natural feeling. Plus," he said, "it's good to be the king."


Sit inside and you're greeted not with Jag's classic wooden longboard set into an upright dash, but a sloping instrument panel trimmed in aluminum. There's actually more wood in here than in any Jag since the MkII, but it's not in ye same olde places. And unlike recent Jag sedans with their high H-points, you feel surrounded and cocooned by this car, thanks to its high, armrest-like center console. It has more trunk space than any other Jag, and its back seat feels roomier than the S-type, even if the numbers don't bear this out. But the coolest part of the interior is either: a) the glovebox's RAF-style target (Callum was a Mod, and had the multi-mirrored Lambretta scooter and everything) that releases with a graze of your finger, or b) the start-up sequence itself. You push the start-stop button once, and it pulses red in imitation of a heartbeat. Press it again, and the car's round shift dial rises like a piston out of the center console as the air vents lift open. That's right: The dreaded J-gate shifter is gone. Once you select drive, you never have to touch the gear selector again (unless you want to grab sport mode), as Jag has finally provided paddles behind the wheel for quick manumatic shifting.

Somewhat cheesier, to my mind, is the car's night lighting. The glow is turquoise and surrounds most of the buttons and panels on the center console. Jag was going for the look of the RAZR phone and has achieved it, but by now it seems kind of passe, like the RAZR itself. Note to designers — next time, model your interior after something with more longevity, like a celebrity relationship. The coked-out 'zazz of the lit-up cabin is redeemed by a Bowers & Wilkins optional 13-speaker set up, whose Kevlar midrange cones and aluminum tweeters deliver studio-level clarity, tone, and separation.




Undergirding the well-trimmed and sculpted body are pieces that will be familiar to anyone who's ever crawled around a new XK. The XF shares the XK's AJ-series engines — a naturally aspirated V-8 giving 300 horsepower, and the 420-hp supercharged V-8 from the XKR. It also uses the XK's winning control-arm front/multilink rear suspension, but with modified spring/damper settings and stiffer bushings. The supercharged SV8 model also gets standard CATS adaptive suspension. (Incidentally, the XF's windshield and backlight rakes are the same as the XK's.) Where the whole four-door XK conceit hits the proverbial hay bale is en route to the procurement department: Its structure is chiefly of steel, not aluminum. Kevin Stride, the XF's chief engineer, said Jag went with steel for reasons of timing, cost, and complexity. "It would have taken us an extra six months to deliver this car in aluminum," he said. "And there would be pieces that would have been a lot more money. Like, the C-pillar on the XK is a complicated bit of welding and joining, and we'd have to do the same thing here if we didn't use steel." So how much weight does it add? "100 kilograms or so," said Stride. That's only one extra fat guy in the back seat. Competitively speaking, though, the 4061-lb supercharged XF is about 120 pounds heavier than a 550i; the 3856-lb naturally aspirated version weighs just four pounds less than the CTS. But the XF's material mix of 25 types of steel (plus a little deftly applied boron, aluminum, and magnesium), gives it the stiffest structure in its class.

You feel it when the car darts into a corner. Turn-in is immediate, and the body transitions like a skier. Extreme torsional Nm/deg ratings allow a level of suspension stiffness never before seen on a Jag. Its secondary ride characteristics keep the car flat over the waviest of roads, but primary ride doesn't suffer as a result — wheel impacts are as supple as the XJ's. The CATS system now varies each corner independently rather than in front and rear pairs, and this, in combination with the ingot-like structure, gives the XF an amazingly coherent ride-and-handling balance. It doesn't dive under hard braking, and even a mid-corner bump is dispatched without a hint of rocking memory. If you were to graph it, the XF's chassis would sit at the very top right of any refinement/aggressiveness plotting — always silky, always ready to pounce.

I drove both the naturally aspirated V-8 ($49,975, base) and the supercharged ($62,975) versions, and initially thought the unblown car was a bit more enjoyable. With about 200 fewer pounds over the front axle, the car's reflexes felt more natural. The steering had fractionally more feedback and, though this is unrelated to its weight distribution, the throttle response was more progressive and easier to modulate. Though its acceleration suffers by more than a full second (6.2 vs. 5.1), the naturally aspirated V-8 felt perfectly matched to the car's movements. Then I got back into the supercharged version and selected the SV8-only engine map called Dynamic Mode. The upshifts came later, the downshifts happened earlier, the body felt tauter, and the torque flowed like a tidal wave. It was as if the car had suddenly retained Roger Clemens' personal trainer. With Dynamic Mode on, the SV8's controls were more cohesive, and made the un-supercharged car feel somewhat tame by comparison. There's a 500-hp version coming, too, and that should be a stonker.



Both XFs, however, are already what Jaguars ought to be — fast, beautiful cars. If the E-type had been nothing more than a rehash of the XK150, it never would have become so iconic. Similarly, if the MkII didn't break its own set of styling rules, we wouldn't still be referencing it almost 50 years later. The Jaguar tradition isn't a wood-and-leather-trimmed cul de sac, where ideas keep looping back on themselves endlessly. It's a tradition that's decidedly untraditional, that tilts against complacency and repetition and embraces the new and the progressive. It's good to have the real Jaguar back, even if it's only for a few more months.


Source: MotiveMagazine - Motive First Drive: 2009 Jaguar XF