SA Road Tests

 

Welcome

This is the home of automobile road tests in South Africa. We drive South African cars, SUVs and LCVs under South African conditions. It also just happens that most of the vehicles we drive are world cars as well, so what you read here probably applies to the models you can get at home.

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*Please remember too, that prices quoted were those ruling on the days I wrote the reports.

We drive the 2011 Jaguar XJ 5.0 V8

A mystique few can match

Published in The Witness Motoring on Wednesday February 23, 2011

Old guys, yummy mummies and school kids stop to look and smile, murmur: "Jagwah!" approvingly and move on. It's all to do with the heritage. Without it, many new luxury car brands struggle to gain acceptance but those with an aura, a romantic history, touch people's souls and make them smile. So it is with Jaguar. Its history of exotic sports cars, quick family saloons, racing and rallying successes and a touch of cops versus robbers on English motorways has created a mystique that few can match.

But it's time to move on. New XFs, XKs and XJs, although there might be a retrospective styling cue here or there, were designed and built for the here and now. The new XJ's look is sleek yet powerful, with a strong visage and hunched-forward front end. Elegantly drawn side lines create an impression of greater length before finishing in powerful haunches at the rear. Much to old-guarders' disgust, it doesn't look a bit like any of the heritage models. On the plus side, it isn't a clone of any of those Huns either.

What it does have in common with competitors is pretty much every modern safety aid and convenience item you can tick on an options list. The difference is that the Jaguar includes most of them in its list price. About all you can add is in-car video entertainment with a pair of 8-inch screens, wireless headphones and a dual view version of the front touch screen. If you are truly homesick for your front parlour, there is a 1200-Watt, 15-speaker Bowers and Wilkins music system to replace the far-from-shabby standard unit.

XJs are offered with a choice of the "S" version of the company's 3.0 litre diesel or three interpretations of its 5.0 litre V8 petrol motor. Our test car was fitted with the unblown V8 that develops 283 kW of power and 515 Nm of torque. It has all the verve any sane person needs, with a good chance of scoring bonus points at resale time. Buyers don't want to worry about expensive blowers that could possibly fail and implode hard-earned savings.

Mated to all engine variants is a six-speed ZF torque converter transmission with the usual "sport" option and steering wheel paddles for manual override. There is no stick because of the JaguarDrive's rotary selector. Unlike most paddle shifters however, this one holds on to selected gears long enough to do what is wanted. Another increasingly common feature is the ability to choose different driving behaviours to suit circumstance and mood. In addition to "normal," Jaguar offers a wet weather mode marked with a snowflake and a dynamic option marked with a chequered flag. This is the fun version.

Dial in S on the rotary selector and hold the chequered flag button down for a couple of seconds. The virtual instruments on the electronic panel turn red, the seatbelts tug you in a notch tighter and the XJ drops into "fight" mode. Suspension settings stiffen, throttle and steering responses sharpen and it's time to banish those bogeys, Biggles. Flick the paddles and let the games begin. Doctor Pumpkin's prescription: to be enjoyed at least once weekly while spouse and children are safely parked off at Mother's.

"But a Jag isn't a Jag without fine old English wood," you say? Relax, there's more of it than ever before. It sweeps in broad panels along the tops of all four doors and narrows to a strip curving between the top of the leather-trimmed dash and the lower edge of the windscreen. There's a little panel labelled "Jaguar" right at the centre of the strip, but you can apparently have this customised if that would make your whiskers twitch. There are nine different panelling grains but if wooden veneer is simply too boring and 'old fogey' for you, how about a choice between carbon fibre and piano black?

The interior, as befits the premier model range of a premium brand, is sumptuous. Apart from the wooden panelling mentioned above, there are acres of leather, four-channel air conditioning so that rear passengers can select their own temperatures, reading lights, footwell lights, a separate control so those in the back can decide for themselves when to open the inner blind of the sunroof and a touchscreen-controlled command interface. This is where the icing crumbles a little. It's slow, unintuitive, and even doing something as un-guylike as reading the manual, doesn't really help.

Confession time: This writer owns an XJ6 Series 2, so could be called an old-guarder. He loves his elderly car but that doesn't stop him seeing merit in progress. Time marches on and we move with it. It's part of the future heritage.

The numbers

Price: R1 112 312

Engine: 5 000 cc V8, 32 valve

Power: 283 kW at 6 500 rpm

Torque: 515 Nm at 3 500 rpm

Zero to 100 km/h: 5.7 seconds

Maximum speed: Governed to 250 km/h

Average fuel consumption: about 13.7 l/100 km

Tank: 82 litres

Boot: 520 litres

Maintenance plan: 5 years/100 000 km

 

What We Do

This is a one-man show, which means that road test cars entrusted to me are driven only by me. Some reviewers hand test cars over to their partners to use as day-to-day transport and barely experience them for themselves.

What this means to you is that every car reviewed is given my own personal evaluation and receives my own seat of the pants judgement - no second hand input here.

Every car goes through real world testing; on city streets littered with potholes, speed bumps and rumble strips, on freeways and if its profile demands, dirt roads as well.

I am based in Pietermaritzburg, KZN, South Africa. This is the central hub of the KZN Midlands farming community; the place farmers go to to buy their supplies and equipment, truck their goods to market, send their kids to school and go to kick back and relax. 

So occasionally a cow, a goat or a horse may add a little local colour by finding its way into the story or one of the pictures. It's all part of the ambience!

 

Comments?

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