When it comes to names, Jaguar retains a powerfully emotive magic. Of course, it could be said that as part of the Ford empire, it retains little else. Nevertheless, few words summon up a kind of dashing aspirational Englishness with such reflexive certainty. One needs only to utter its first syllable for a vivid picture to form of a chiffon-cravatted bachelor - Simon Dee, perhaps - ushering a miniskirted dolly bird into a silver E-type, or an MK2 neglecting to observe the speed limit as it leaves a post-office blag in Wembley. What you don't see is a family estate car from which to unload the week's shopping. Nor, alas, did my wife.

"Where?" she asked, when I said I had a Jag outside. "There," I replied, pointing along our street, which only contained three other cars, one of them our hatchback.

"Where?" "There!"

That is an abridged version of a conversation that went on in the same vein for rather longer than I enjoyed. The problem was she was looking at its boot, which, from a visual perspective, is not unlike the boot of every other estate car made this century.

To say that it is an inconspicuous rear end does not begin to do justice to its confusing blandness. I stood for almost a minute squeezing the remote key in a fruitless attempt to open the door before it dawned me that I was actually trying to get into my neighbour's VW Passat estate. I also had an unfortunate experience with a Daewoo Nubira in the courtyard of a country hotel, which I won't go into here. An adaptation to that annoying rear windscreen sticker that says "My other car is a Porsche" might go some way to preventing these misunderstandings: a simple reminder such as "This car is a Jaguar".

The point is that, as with nervous horses and Jennifer Lopez, the Jaguar X-type sport estate is not a creature best approached from behind. From the front, however, it is proudly and unmistakably Jaguaresque. The elegant, bevelled contours of the bonnet, the familiar aristocratic grille and the seductively elliptical headlights are all characteristics that make a head-on encounter so much more rewarding, and helpfully distinctive, than the reverse introduction.

There is, needless to say, only so long you can spend getting into a car, even when you factor in all the other cars you've incorrectly undertaken to enter; sooner or later, you have to drive the thing.

The complaint that is made of the X-type is not that it performs like so many other cars, but that it performs like one car in particular, the Ford Mondeo, on whose platform it is built. This is not a particularly harsh criticism, as far as I'm concerned, because the Ford Mondeo is a fine vehicle. All the same, it's not a Jag.

Certainly, if you're forking out over 32 grand, with all the extras, you don't want to be mistaken for an ink-jet salesman. Happily, this is not a problem with the estate, because salesmen don't drive estate cars. But, as I found out whenever I tried to relocate the X-type, a surprisingly large number of other people do. And I'm not sure why.

Unlike SUVs, which are much more a lifestyle statement (specifically, "Get out of my way, I'm taking my kids to private school"), the bigness of an estate seems to be nostalgically attached to a notion of practicality. Yet, unless you're in the decorating business, the only time you'd need all that boot space is when loading up for a family holiday. And the kind of people who buy estates are the kind of people who fly abroad for their holidays.

Notwithstanding that contradiction, the X-type sets out to counter the image of suburban pragmatism by sexing it up with sporty trimmings. But if the concept of a sport estate is not already worryingly oxymoronic, a diesel sport estate seems to drive the notion of sportiness to the furthest outskirts of meaning. Something about the taxi purr of a diesel does not square with the youthful raciness implied by "sport", especially when you're carrying roof bars and a back end situated in a different time zone.

Actually, that's not quite fair. For an estate, the X-type is pretty compact. A little too compact if you're an adult in the back and are keen to continue the blood supply to your feet. Indeed, there's a suspicion of reverse-Tardis syndrome here. The X-type looks long enough on the outside to turn the search for a parking space into a Conradian adventure, but compressed enough inside to make you wonder why you got an estate in the first place.

The front seats are a different matter. If we're calling a spade a spade, they're not quite a bucket, but they're tailored and shapely and feature a multi-dimensional adjustment system that should keep the kids happy for hours in the unlikely event of a breakdown or, still more improbable, the discovery of a suitable parking space. The rest of the charcoal-grey interior, like the simple modern-retro dashboard, is perfectly inoffensive and tasteful with out ever quite conveying the sense of luxury promised by the badge.

Such nitpicking would remain just that if the car was a joy to drive. But in a urban setting, it comes precariously close to being a drag. In the stop/start environment of a town or city, there is a decided lack of oomph at low speed, and any hesitation in changing down gears can result in the impression that you've forgotten you'd hooked a caravan on to the back.

On the open road, though, the X-type comes into its own. Cruising along a motorway at 90mph (I imagine - I was careful not to go above 70) with the soothing voice of the woman on the GPS system encouraging you to continue, the car attains the smoothness and sense of purpose of the Eurostar nearing top speed. That's when you can sit back and dream you're driving a Jag.

The lowdown
Jaguar X-type sport estate

Price: £32,462
Top speed: 123mph
Acceleration: 0-60 in 9.8 seconds
Consumption: 36.7 [urban] / 60.4mpg
At the wheel: Dave Lee Travis
On the stereo: Hits of the 60s Vol III
En route for: The Cotswolds via B&Q