Andrew English flew to Arizona to test the XF - the new sedan that is crucial to Jaguar's future
The factory visits
are over, due diligence is done and the bids are in. Jaguar, along with
its sister company Land Rover,
is "in play" and, according to industry insiders, Ford (the vendor
of both) will make its mind up between the bids from two
Indian car-makers and a private equity firm in the next two weeks.
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| Playful: if you stare at the headlights on the XF for long enough they'll wink at you |
In two weeks of
back-from-the-dead comebacks, Jaguar is eagerly knocking on the coffin
lid alongside the man who lost his
canoe, the Spice Girls, Vladimir Putin and Gordon Brown. It claims to
have a forthright new strategy, a money-spinning new
coupé, the XK, and now its new XF sedan, possibly the year's most
over-hyped car.
Yet even the most
cursory glance at the books reveals the parlous state in which a tawdry
procession of ex-Ford bosses have
left Sir William Lyons's once-proud car-maker. In the past decade,
annual sales rose from 50,000 to 130,000 in 2002 - then fell
back to about 63,000 this year. Sales for the big XJ sedan say it all.
In 1998 Jaguar sold 37,000 of these highly profitable flagships,
but this year it will struggle to flog 12,000 and most of those are in
America, where the weak dollar means the yields are spectacularly
reduced.
"It's almost as
if they've forgotten how to sell cars," one ex-Jaguar executive said to
me the other day. Indeed the whole sorry saga is
beginning to look like some ghastly business TV reality show; Dragon's
Den meets I'm A Celebrity… perhaps?
Let's call it I'm A Chief Executive - Get Me Out Of Coventry.
Ever since Ford
purchased Jaguar for £1.6billion in 1989, it has treated the company
like a guinea pig in a sinister laboratory
of experimental corporate ideas. So Ford's mighty Michigan mastodons
came up with the experiment to upscale Jaguar to build
400,000 cars a year and compete with Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz - it
was a disaster. There was the experiment to revive the
E-type sports car as the F-type - another disaster. The experiment to
convert a Ford Mondeo into a small, premium Jaguar, the X-type
- ditto.
The Formula One
initiative - don't ask. The experiment to build the new XK sedan out
of aluminum-alloy but not change its appearance
one iota - a complete disaster. The experiment of basing a whole new corporate
strategy around one "Gorgeous" advertising campaign - disastrous. Yet
despite these class-A snafus, worthy of a Pol Pot-style executive cull,
the corporate egos merely collected their golden
farewells and moved on to their next Learjet.
And Jaguar? Like
some poor smoking beagle rescued from the vivisectionists, it is slowly
making a wheezy recovery while, in the
Detroit fantasy executive world, Ford seems to have forgotten Jaguar
even exists as it tries to recover from a tailspin of debt and
financial disaster. One month ago, at the Los Angeles motor show, blue-oval
boss Alan Mullally embraced Lincoln as Ford's
premium worldwide brand. This was as much news in Coventry as it was
in Detroit.
So now we have the XF, a new sedan to replace the mid-sized S-type that was launched 10 years ago.
May I lever a
good, old-fashioned shovel under the manhole cover of the public-relations
business here and allow you a whiff
of what flows beneath? In the past decade Jaguar has done more to muddy
the water between fact and fantasy than Walt Disney
ever managed. By playing the public, the press and its own advertising
against each other, the company has created a new gold
standard of duplicity. At one time, for Jaguar, the term "exclusive" meant
the colour of the car you were given to drive.
While this is
in the past, some of the overkill and hubris still remains; thus we have
had a steady stream of XF "news" out of
Coventry all year - dodgy exclusives, passenger-seat road tests, apparently
record residual values for the XF and a shelf-load
of design awards.
Don't believe
what you read. Jaguar's trophy cabinet might be groaning with the weight
of the Golden Lobster of Utrecht and
other designer gongs, but these are seldom awarded to truly beautiful
cars.
My own reaction,
seeing the XF at motor shows and press events, has been mixed; I've loved
and hated it, often both at once.
At a glance, the overall shape is fluent and attractive. Yet stare too
long at a detail and you become fixated with its incongruity.
The grille, for instance, starts to look like George Bush's jutting
jawline and, if you gaze at the car from off-centre, the headlamps
appear to wink at you. Certainly the front is the most controversial
aspect and the XF is highly affected by its coachwork colour
- it looks terrible in silver, quite good in green.
The rear and the flanks are more successful, especially the jaunty quarter-relief
Jaguar leaping across the trunk lid.
I am conscious,
however, that some people will love the XF and also that Chris Bangle's
contentious BMW designs were fiercely
criticised yet eventually won over the critics and increased sales. So
full marks to design director Ian Callum and his team for
daring to risk an all-new direction for Jaguar, and to the management
for allowing it. Though you might find that this is not an
easy shape to love, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So, behold
the XF.
Only slightly
less contentious is what we were doing in a rainy and chilly Arizona desert
driving a quintessentially British car
- Lord alone knows. It confused the hell out of the immigration
official who stamped my passport:
"'Scuse my suggestion,
sir, but if y'all had driven this British Jagwaar in Britain, it
might have saved a few bucks and some air fuel."
The new Jag goes on sale on March 1 and we will eventually get a model
line-up consisting of two 4.2-litre V8 models, with and
without a supercharger.
The chassis is
derived from that of the S-type, which in turn was derived from the Lincoln
LS - the Lincoln's blow-moulded plastic
fuel tank is one of the few bits of that car that remains in the XF.
It uses the double wishbone suspension and brakes from the XK coupé.
Inside, Jaguar
has really gone to town on the design. Forget the crummy S-type with its
Christmas-cracker cabin - this is all new
and innovative. From its brilliantly simple rotary gear selector, which
rises like a Bond-villain's doomsday button from the centre
console when you start the engine, to the heavily striated wood panels
and the maculated aluminium-alloy trim, there's a boldness
about the design that captures the attention.
Accommodation
is generous in front, with plush, supportive seats and electronic adjustment
for these and the steering wheel.
There are long shallow door bins, centre cup holders that double as sweet
and iPod stores and a large glovebox that is opened
by pressing a small roundel symbol on the wood panel - a sign of
the legendary British sense of humour.
The button on our test car didn't work, which was almost as funny as a
box set of Carol Burnett videos for Christmas.
In the rear, space
is at a premium, although I managed to sit behind myself with half an
inch to spare before my head hit the
sloping roofline and my knees touched the scalloped seat back. The trunk
is big enough for at least two big Samsonites and
the rear seat-backs fold down to allow for the carriage of skis, or for
banister thieves and giraffe smugglers.
That some of the
cabin's novelty is gimmicky (like the glovebox button) is almost inevitable.
The "handshake" on start-up, when
the starter button glows and pulses "like a tiny heart" and the facia
vents swivel around, might be intriguing now, but not so much
perhaps, after 50,000 miles.
Thankfully much
of this can be programmed out and one shouldn't overlook the degree of
thought that has gone in here.
The way the dashboard top has been lowered and the front-seat head restraints
minimised to allow passengers and driver a
better view out of the windshield is charming.
There's a class
and style about sitting in this Jaguar that is wholly lacking in its rivals
and, frankly, the XF makes the interior
of BMW's 5-series look like an austere museum piece.
There were only
two engines to drive at launch, the 4.2-litre V8 in supercharged and naturally
aspirated forms.
The supercharged car benefits from the damping work done to quieten the
whining blower and bring out the more subtle
aspects of the engine's "voice".
It's also something
of a flying machine. With 410bhp to move almost 1.9 tons, the blown XF
leaves the line smartly and if you
keep your foot down the charge only slows perceptibly when you are into
three-figure speeds. The maximum is limited to 155mph
and the Jag gets there terrifyingly fast. The engine never feels strained
or short on power and while the growling, roaring and
slurping might be muted from the inside, from outside the SV8 sounds
like a dragon with a strop on.
By contrast the
naturally aspirated lump is more old-fashioned, with possibly the better
sound quality. It, too, is quick but its
delivery is more understandable and refined as the rev counter curls
its way up the dial rather than jumping in leaps and bounds
as it does in the supercharged car.
On both models,
the ZF six-speed gearbox seriously blurs the line between a manual and
an automatic. It really is that good - taut,
so you never feel the slurp of a torque converter, but easy. Those
steering-wheel paddles twirl with the wheel rim to ensure you are
never more than a fingertip from a gearchange. Stick it into sports mode
and the car does it for you, even revving on each
downshift like a GT racer into Silverstone's Abbey corner.
Ride and handling
are points of serious pride at Jaguar, where experts hone the chassis
and suspension to deliver a car that
whips around corners and inspires even modest drivers without frightening
them or shaking them around like a dervish.
Like most really
fast cars, there's a lighter-than-air quality to the XF and it showed
it on the tortuous twisting road to Tortilla Flats,
which tested the XF's suspension at both extremes of wheel travel. Yes,
it's a heavy, front-engined sedan and the nose does
push wide on corners, but there's a finely wrought balance between nervousness
and stability here. It's genuinely fun to drive hard,
but relaxing when you don't want to. The steering is absolutely first
rate, not quite as razor-sharp as some German sedans, but well
weighted and a constant source of information about the available grip.
Of the two cars,
I preferred the slightly more fluent ride and less ostentatiously aggressive
handling of the unsupercharged version.
It isn't as fast, but it turns in better and has a magic-carpet ride
quality, soaking up bumps and potholes with quite brilliant body control.
With 19in wheels and tyres and 200lb less kerb weight this model rolls
slightly more than its 20in-shod supercharged sister and feels
slightly less clamped to the road surface, but it is a better everyday
driver and a lot more economical. It also seems slightly quieter
at speed, with less wind buffeting round the door mirrors, although these
pre-production cars were a bit variable in that respect.
With either power plant, however, the XF is an object lesson in the art of swift, unruffled travel.
The brakes betray
the development work that has gone into them, with a sensitivity that
allows you stop the car smoothly, but with
unfading power that sloughs off speed time after time. New for the XF is
a pre-prime system that detects sudden throttle lift and
applies a gentle brake-circuit pressure to get the car ready for a sudden
stop.
In the next couple
of weeks we will know who next takes up the reins at Jaguar. Among the
workforce there's an understandable
nervousness at the prospect, but they also have a new-found confidence
in their vision of what Jaguar is, what it is not and,
most importantly, what it does best.
The XF is just
such an example. It might not be a classically beautiful car, but it makes
a powerful statement and I've got a feeling
its shape, if not that grille, will grow on you. Its fast and sure-footed
abilities most certainly will, and that lovely cabin will always
remain a delightful place. Completely at odds, in fact, with the wintry
Arizona desert.
Can someone please explain why we were there?
Jaguar XF
We like
The style (well, some of it), the luxurious interior, the superb handling
of the supercharged car and the composed
ride and fine balance of the naturally aspirated version.
We don’t
like The grille, metallic silver coachwork, overwhelming maculated
aluminium trim on facia.
Anything silver, in other words. And Arizona in winter.
Alternatives Audi A6, BMW 5-series, Cadillac CTS, Lexus GS, Mercedes-Benz E-class, Volvo S80.
