Jaguar XJ R 4.2
Price From £60,252
Top speed 155mph
Acceleration 0-60 in 5 seconds
Consumption 33.4mpg (combined)
CO² Emissions 289g/km
Eco rating 2/10
At the wheel David Gill
Top gadget Rear TVs
In a word Tweedy
I have seen the Jaguar XJ saloon car range described on the web as "supercharged transport for fat businessmen", but that's a bit reductive, isn't it? Quite thin businessmen like them, too.
It also scants recent efforts by Jaguar to go cheaper and aim a little younger, thus closing a long phase in the company's history when it would not have been entirely unreasonable to enquire whether anyone under the age of 55 had ever knowingly bought one.
Still, it can't be denied that the new XJ is very much an old-school Jag - a sumptuous status wagon for people enjoying the bigger kind of wallet and the slightly longer kind of tooth. The XJ R, which we drove, is supposedly the hot-wheeled Fancy Dan of the fleet, with a restyled body, including an all-new, Baby Bentley-esque front grille - a two-piece affair in tough-looking mesh, as if the car had recently gone nose-first through the fence around a high-security compound. But even here, one feels, footballers are unlikely to be heading the queue. Football club directors, on the other hand, could well be tripping over each other.
Inside the car, in keeping with the Jaguar heritage, a formal dressing table appears to be trying to escape from a leather sofa, producing that weird compression of styles often seen in deluxe car interiors, as if partly aimed at satisfying Princess Anne, and partly intended to titillate a gay biker. And it is, of course, achingly well put together. Had you told me the wood for the walnut trim had been hand-selected by fairies and laminated by specially retrained Welsh elves, I wouldn't have doubted you for a second.
Huge and smooth, like some mighty meteor, the car cuts through the air in near silence, its V8 engine only ever troubling to clear its throat under abrupt acceleration and otherwise going about its business with a muffled hum, as if double-wrapped in green baize. As a result, whenever I got behind the controls I felt I should have been wearing a peaked cap. Every time I parked it I had to fight the urge to stand around near the back of it, having a crafty cigarette, in the manner of chauffeurs since time immemorial.
In other words, despite the sporty setup, piloting the XJ R felt like a strangely servile thing to be doing in it, given the other options. I grew to believe the real fun was going on in the rear. There were TV screens back there, mounted, aeroplane-style, in the front-seat headrests, and there were comfy chairs and miles of legroom and, for all I knew, people quietly serving tea and cucumber sandwiches. It seemed that the car was mostly calling upon you to lie back and marvel at it, rather than do anything as vulgar - and, to all intents and purposes, "below stairs" - as drive it.
Still, here's a thing: optional extras for the XJ include a roof box. They've got to be kidding. Invest more than 60 grand in a tribute to the science of aerodynamics and then pin a grey plastic wind-trap to its roof? Talk about gauche. You might as well paint it orange and stick up a sunstrip reading "Dave and Karen".
