Forty grand turismo

Giant test: Jaguar XE vs rivals
The Jag’s dowdy dark blue is less fattering but brighter light
and brighter hues reveal handsome, if perhaps disappointingly
conservative lines that success in China and North America
demands. There’s real drama at the front, but it’s strangely reminiscent
of Volvo’s old S40 from other angles,
and what is it with Jag’s wheel designs? The
base XE seems to be wearing a set of 1970s
Appliance Turbo Vec alloys normally found
on porthole-festooned custom vans, and the
R-Sport test car’s looked like a set of ancient
GKNs you might have picked up from a Ripspeed
catalogue around the same period.
Luckily, other wheel designs are available.
For all those misgivings, the XE would
have out-posed a 3-series, had we brought
one, and stands up well in the face of the
slinkier 420d, the only car here optioned up
with arch-flling 19-inch wheels that work
the hardest despite their bigger footprint.
BMW’s 20d engines have been showing reps
how to have fun for 15 years and, thanks to
continued evolution, still deliver the goods.
Stomp the right pedal and the 420d pulls
strongest, its 187bhp outpunching the Jag
by 9bhp and the Benz by 19 (the pricier C250
CDI parries with 201bhp) to power through
to 62mph in just 7.3sec. The Merc makes
the same 295lb ft as its Munich rival, the
XE 317lb ft, but the Jag fails to capitalise on
its 22lb ft advantage, needing half a second
longer to hit the benchmark, while the Merc
shrugs of its power defcit to get within a
tenth of the BMW, at 7.4sec. Swap Spanish
mountains for German dual carriageways
and the Jag would be all done by 140mph
(a sop to the insurance industry, we’re told), while the Merc’s
144mph would trump its rival by a mere 2mph.
Given that these are sports saloons, none of them feels truly
rapid, and neither are any of their engines remotely characterful.
You’ll need petrol power, or the BMW’s optional six-cylinder
diesel, for that. But they’re grunty enough to keep you interested,
and possess sufcient ratios in their transmissions
(seven gears in the Merc, eight in the others) to keep them in
the 2000-4500rpm zone where the turbos like to play. Powering
up the smoothly surfaced ribbon of bitumen behind LaGuardia
reveals a bit of a gap between second and third in the Jag, but in
a straight run through the gears from there on, the revs barely
seem to fall before the needle is picked up again for another
trip to the redline. Decide to play those tunes yourself and your
fngers will delight with the cool touch of real metal shift paddles,
something even the F-type was denied on cost grounds at
launch. They don’t come cheap, though, at £375.
Sweet chassis and
supple ride mean
every road is a
good one in the Jag
110 CARMAGAZINE.CO.UK | June 2015
BMW threw all its eforts into
the ‘sport’ bit and forgot
to tick the refinement box.
Jaguar didn’t forget
The BMW also uses the ZF 8HP ’box, but seems to deliver a
bigger thunk to the back when each ratio comes on line. It’s the
only car here to ofer anything resembling a normal automatic
gearshifter: the XE gets Jag’s now-familiar rotary controller,
and the Mercedes a column-shifter that frees up useful storage
space on the console (unless you go for the more conventionally
presented six-speed manual).
A column shift doesn’t sound or look like sports saloon material,
but that’s just one example of how Mercedes has confdently
asserted its own agenda, after previously slavishly following
BMW’s. Body motions are well controlled and the fast 2.1-turns
variable-ratio steering rack imbues the C-class with a surprising
pointiness, but never at the expense of sophistication or stability.
This can do the twisty stuf with ease, but it’s not massively engaging.
Task it with a high speed A-road run though, and that’s
where it shows its mettle.
The 420d is diferent. Rawer, more feelsome, less comfortable,
it doesn’t deal with surface imperfections anything like as well,
but keys you into that surface better. There’s less understeer in
the fat-tyred BMW and more opportunity to experience the traditional
sensations of a rear-drive chassis. No-one really turns
the ESP of in these cars, much like no-one drives their new
Lambo at 202mph, the diference between C220 and 420 being
that you actually can in the BMW, and you might want to.
The Jag complies too; at least to demands to deactivate the
ESP, though the grip/grunt ratio is skewed in favour of the rubber
so if you want to make tyre fres you’ll need the 335bhp XE
S – or the XE R if you’ve got the patience to wait a year or two. But
what even this humble diesel does show is that there’s more to4
C-class’s strangely cab
backward stance not its
finest hour, but you won’t
care from inside that cab