Gadgetory

a big jag XJ back in the day that used to mean a very quaint thing full of wood and leather that might not start tomorrow morning nowadays it's a whole different story they got a new high-tech v6 this thing's all aluminum skin and they have more screens inside the cabin than almost anything on the road let's drive this 2013 jagex J all wheel drive and check the tech now the current generation XJ is not so much a pretty or elegant car to me like it used to be as much as it is a handsome and a very present vehicle it definitely makes a statement as you roll up in one but your key styling cues here are three things the narrow blade taillights in the back very distinctive the blackout see pillars that make the back of the roof appear to float except on a black car where the effect is canceled out and the Jaguar face which is now the new family grille now before we even get in this guy I want to know who's paying off Jaguar is it the chiropractor's union or the orthopedic surgeons Union one's gonna make a ton of money on this guy because of this big wide sill you see it sticks out so far that every damn time I get it out of this guy I bang my Achilles tendon on it give me about a 150 reps of that and I'm in the hospital getting it sewn up again now I don't know why Jaguar keeps sending us cards and have such ugly color schemes I was encouraged by the black on the outside but not by this color of a cheap synthetic baseball mitt on the inside let's get to the tech now you got two big screens the one here on the left is still pretty revolutionary a 12 inch wide profile LCD for the instrument panel there are no dials or gauges in this car with the exception of the clock if you want to count that fuel temperature speed tachometer and those can change and morph into a different type of screen sometimes the tach gives way to warnings and the whole thing turns red when you're in dynamic mode or blue when you're in winter driving mode so it's very evocative and as you can see the map quality is pretty good I've always been pretty pleased with Jaguars map quality and it's very well rendered but pretty basic you've got a 3d mode you've got a 2d mode and you've got North up there isn't a lot of nonsense like fly through buildings there's no Google Earth there's nothing of the really advanced type of map display but they get the job done they've got a new interface for the different destination menus address is the one you'll use the most often but they've also got some oddballs like getting to a highway by route number when would I do that or coordinates what is this thing a Land Rover San Francisco California I give up if you can't recognize that and ain't much good to me so I'll be tapping things in over here on the screen as you can see this car is kind of pokey when you're entering things on the on screen interface so it's an improvement but it's still kind of a underperformance system with either its dopey voice command or the fact that it takes a very long time to tap things in on the screen now in terms of meaning you've got am/fm satellite radio free for three months and HD radio on this guy as well under my music you find all the other interesting choices and yes they break up radio from my music which always makes me nuts here's what an iPod interface looks like they do a pretty good job of calling out the the navigation I find the buttons and all are very clear but I wish they would use more screen real estate for things like titles bluetooth streaming worked yesterday won't work at all today but it has a pretty good support for meta tags and was pretty good at navigating my actual music collection but that was yesterday you've also got 30 gigabytes of hard drive space in this car something else that I don't think is terribly exciting what you do have are a whole lot of surround modes from standard stereo to Meridien to Dolby PL to 2 DTS and that's because we have the top Meridian sound system here this guy is 825 watts and 20 speakers now of course the Jaguar is full of nice amenities inside the cabin especially in XJ you'll notice of course their trademark pop-up shift rotating deal here for Park reverse neutral Drive and sport mode when you're in Reverse you do have a standard backup camera and front and rear sensors no extra cost on those next to it here is the winter driving mode I mentioned earlier right below that is dynamic driving mode your most aggressive recurving of the entire drivetrain related to the drivetrain controls though are this eco button over here which I pushed a lot because this car has automatic start/stop and as you'll see when we get on the road I'm not a huge fan of it in this case Jaguar has lots of little economic quirks throughout this car our first of all this is apparently a cellphone bin but it's too weird for a modern phone it's nice and tall and it's not white enough for it to go sideways so it's basically useless they went to the effort of making a touch-sensitive glovebox release I never had a problem releasing a glove box with an actual button or lever but I guess that's an identifying principle for the Jaguar brand and the same thing goes for the overhead lights nothing moves you just touch them it's cool I don't know that it gets us anywhere and this switch over here for the steering wheel heater is so big and so touchy you'll be turning on the wheel heater all the time believe me and when you want to go verify if it's on or off you can't because the little indicator light isn't bright enough to be seen in the daylight so you just kind of got to hold it and say is it a hot day or is the wheel on not available here would be lane departure warning whether it's active or passive not here or front collision prevention even though you can get the car with optional adaptive cruise control and the overhead dual panoramic sunroof which is not really panoramic that's got a big old bar in the middle that is standard as well on an XJ but that one over the second row is really shallow I'm not sure it's that well done compared to having a big glass top here now here in the scoop we've got a three liter supercharged direct-injected v6 this is a big story because this car used to come with a v8 only a big old five liter you can still get that but this is the new smart motor in the XJ the numbers 340 horsepower 332 foot-pounds of torque this thing weighs a little over 4100 pounds by the way 250 of that is all-wheel drive gear but it gets up to 60 in 6.1 seconds while delivering 1624 mpg which by the way is considered pretty good for its class thank you to the aluminum body and the now supercharged v6 okay so what's it like driving the XJ with all-wheel drive and a supercharged v6 well the first thing I do is I turn off that auto start-stop because I hate it it's kind of crude when it starts and stops you're very aware of it the whole car shutters and shutters and it sounds like a car starting which is fine except it's a Jaguar it's not supposed to have moments like that the next thing you notice is this engine is a doll it just keeps coming great torque very linear the all-wheel drive in this car starts off being rear biased it's a rear-wheel drive car that can activate the front pause think of it that way this is definitely not a BMW there's more roll and there's less Road feedback than you'll get in a similar competing Beemer so it's not a car I want to take in a street fight it's a car I want to take on a weekend trip that has some great roads and one last note there's something about a Jaguar cabin and ride that really has a different kind of distinctive soulful luxury to it there's something sort of quaint sort of traditional and sort of elegant about the cabins of these guys do and it's a nice place to do your business okay let's price this big black beast we've got seventy six six as a base that's four all wheel drive rolled in there really two options to go CNET style one is the Meridian audio upgrade from base Meridian to a hundred and twenty five watts and 20 speakers and that's gonna run you twenty three hundred bucks then there's adaptive cruise control that alone is another twenty three hundred I might leave that one out but if I rolled it all in we're at eighty one three CNET style for a car that's awfully cosseting and has some great tech as well as a few standout bugs