Gadgetory

Jaguar we belong on about this being there Steffes car ever their highest performance production car ever a bunch of superlatives the car makers are given to I'll give you one more it's their most fun car ever that's the highest compliment let's drive this 2015 f-type s coat check the tail now I never thought I'd be able to save this but here's a car that makes the Jag f-type roadster look homely it's sinfully gorgeous now all this rendered in very light stiff aluminum for the most part in fact jag says almost the entire side of the car is one big stamping if I did the math right it's like 25,000 pound-feet of torque to twist this guy longitudinally this way one degree makes for a great platform for a car that you want to be precise and responsive now we have an S that means we're nearly 78 base the vision package 2400 more for smart front headlights sonar and camera cross traffic and blind spot performance package is 3400 more it's you a dynamic mode you can tweak a sport exhaust you'll need earplugs for red disks calipers I can live without that sports seats and wheel a new apps package we'll look at in a moment is 400 and HD and satellite radio come together at 450 all in about 87 thousand dollars the way we'd set it up not a cheap date let's see what you get one of the first things I'm taken by in an f-type coupe cabin is the relative sense of fun and levity going on here we look at the instrument panel man ain't no German car it's full of this garish color italicize numbers when you move into a manual shift mode you get this big superhero number for your gear position this car is all about fun it's also about some silly got the grab handle over here for some reason the upper register vents go up and down via power I have no idea why or by what logic performance controls have a rubbery gold finish on them this dynamics mode button the start/stop the paddles on the wheel and the little button looks like binoculars down here actually opens up the exhaust so it sounds like the how of hell the head unit is a clean interface I've seen it before on Jags not my favorite by any stretch its rectangular and boxy at the expense of being terribly well thought out at least to my eye it's all touch there's no control knob to speak of you do have some homerun buttons around the sides here the problem with that is being deep set and being touched only is kind of like a mission from hell especially when you want to get down to things on the edges just kind of bunks into your knuckles as you're trying to press things not great ergo what's really not great ergo is this car doesn't have any voice command at all I was shocked by that on the other hand the climate knobs are sheer genius putting the number and the state of seat heat in the middle of the knob that controls it I can't every control be like this this is new here in control apps this brings you a flavor of Android auto the first one I've seen in a production car I'm running an app on the phone that allows me to set up a series of other apps that show up here and when I do that blanks out the phone screen so this becomes a feeder for the head unit the good news is it's super clear easy to navigate with nice big indicators the bad news is I've never heard of any of these things except for stitcher it's all rather admirable as an early effort at least but that's if you can keep the phone in the car talking to each other which was more than I could do there's also an additional navigation app you can put on here sitting for 120 bucks luckily we've got nav standard on these cars and it's perfectly functional ok driving the f-type you've got your standard PRN D and sport gait shifter right here here is your drive mode controller back one for dynamic mode up one for snow mode or the middle position is normal you can decide what dynamic mode does with this screen menu here you've also got a track timer and a g-force gauge and a couple other doohickeys you'll use about once or twice under the neat-looking front hood is the thinking drivers engine this is the supercharged v6 3 litres of displacement the supercharger is neatly buried down inside the V of the heads makes for a tidy low package the numbers are good 375 horsepower 339 pound-feet of torque currently only rear-wheel drive and only through an 8-speed sport automatic gearbox weight a model year and the 2016 are going to offer all-wheel drive for the first time and a 6-speed manual for the first time Hey I may just talk to you out of buying an f-type for now now we have an S that means we have a slightly hotter version of the three litre v6 the base car has the same architecture but they don't ring as much out of it as a result this guy gets up to 60 and 4.8 and you're going to get 19 27 mpg you know they talk about rigidity in the shell I don't think I'm imagining it you really do feel it it doesn't seem to have any give anywhere which is equally impressive that the ride is not punishing going along with the engines eagerness and there's no lag because we've got a supercharger and it's the happy breathing engine anyway is this really quick ZF automatic gearbox shifts are about as fast as I could want especially if you get into your dynamics mode or sport mode and yet you retain the civility of an automatic that a lot of dual clutch gearboxes don't have the adaptive suspension samples the road a hundred times per second the rear wing goes up at 70 and then down again at 50 the exhaust is interesting I'm sure you've heard it by now this car calls too much attention to itself all the time I'd like it to go from muted ly sporty to obnoxious here in this car it goes from obnoxious to incredible obnoxious there's nothing below obnoxious and that is ticket bait even if you're not speeding in some this is Jags most successful car in agents it does what it sets out to do when you know me I love cars that do that whatever it is you