2018 Jaguar XF Review

[MUSIC PLAYING] ELANA SCHERR: Today we're with the 2018 Jaguar XF Sportbrake, which is a really fancy way of saying station wagon. This is a luxury station wagon, which I'm hoping is a thing because I think they're really cool. This particular one seats five, has a supercharged V-6, and is backed by an 8 speed automatic. It also carries a bunch of cargo, so we want to see if it could be an alternative if you're shopping for a small SUV. Inside the Jag, you're sort of surrounded by a lot of different materials. Some of them are really excellent like this soft headliner here and cool carbon fiber. This is an option. Some of them are just OK, like plastic. You know, got to make it out of something. The shifter in the Jaguar-- this is kind of their thing right now. And let's start it up. It kind of rises up, and that part's really cool. Once it has risen up, though, you're kind of like, why? That's it, and it takes all of this space. And this thing, it seems to me, could be up here somewhere, thus leaving all of this space for something else. Because one thing that you'll notice is this big huge console, which is nice, has almost no space. There's two cup holders here. There's a little phone pad here. And then you open this expecting, I don't know, a bunch of space, and there's literally like a little change pouch. That's it. Two USBs, an HDMI, a SIM card, and a 12 volt. That's all there is. There's no more space. It doesn't open-- there's no other secret compartment. And that's because all of the HVAC stuff to the back seat kind of runs through here. But I feel like it's a little bit of a sad surprise. Side storage here is not very good either. I don't even think you could fit anything other than the smallest water bottle in here. So I don't really understand why all of these cars have side pockets if you can't put stuff into them. One of the things that's fun about the Jaguar is that there are a lot of internal customizations that you can make. I mean, besides the fact that it has different driving modes. Every time that you change the mode, all of the gauges change. They look different, look sportier in dynamic mode. But if you like a particular gauge, you can actually change that in the menu as well. It has a whole display that you can change everything on it. It's cool that it has all of these options, but they're pretty deep inside of this menu. And it feels like every time you press the button, you're in a different spot than you were the last time you pressed that exact same button. The seats are really comfortable, and they have temperature controls in them so you can have them heated or cooled in the front, and you can have them heated in the back. When you got a four door car, you got to talk about the back seat. And sometimes you get into the back of a car, even a car that has a lot of really nice materials in the front, and the back doesn't feel very special. And that's not true here. All of the same luxury high end materials, the carbon fiber, the printed metal, all the different colored leathers and cross-stitching, that all carries over from the front to the back. The seats in the back are fairly comfortable. There's not a huge amount of room. I'm not very tall, and somebody larger would be uncomfortable, I think, both with the head space and with the leg space. The seat belts don't-- the receiver doesn't sit down flush into the sea. And if you've got people sliding over, making room for more kids or whatever, they're going to hit their hips against it and it really hurts. So if you are designing a car, you want to make sure that this sits down so that you're not ramming into it. The rear seat passengers have control of their own heating and cooling, which is nice. They also have 12 volt plugs, but no USBs, which I think is really unusual here. Because, I mean, who doesn't have USBs in the back now? There's none in this center console either, although there are two cup holders. Why would you even get a wagon instead of a sedan? Well, because you want cargo space. Let's see what the Jag has for us. First thing it has is a ton of space to work around. You've got plenty of headroom up here, and you're not having to lift up from the ground. Everything is right where you need it to be. Which is awesome if you're putting stuff in, or if you're putting a pet in, say, a dog maybe who doesn't want to have to jump up into a high SUV. This is about 30, 31 cubic feet of cargo space. You can put the seats down, and now you've got nearly 70 cubic feet of space. The seats go down, all three. You can put down two, or you can put down just the center section all by itself. One of the things that's great about a wagon is that it's still a car. It's low down, and it's got this low center of gravity and it handles great. It's so different from driving an SUV or a truck, but you still have all of that space. The Jaguar handles as you would hope that a Jaguar would handle, which is good. And it's a heavy car. You can feel that. It's very well weighted so it doesn't feel tail heavy or nose heavy, and it goes around the turns pretty much exactly how you want it to. If you were moving across the mountains, and you had to carry a whole bunch of people or stuff around twisty roads, you really couldn't do better than to get a wagon and do it in. Because we're kind of hauling around here, and it's fine. It's like, yeah. Let's do some more. The brakes in the Jaguar are great. You have no idea that the car is heavy, that you're trying to stop a lot of weight. I mean, it brings it right down. It doesn't feel like it's working hard. It will give you plenty of stopping distance between you and whatever you're trying to not hit. The sport break has a three liter supercharged engine, and if you see supercharged in front of engine, I mean, you could just shorten that to fun. It is a lot of fun. It's very quick. It's very fast. It doesn't necessarily feel like the zippiest immediately off the line. I mean, you're still getting going and you can feel it do that. But once you're in it and you want more of it, it just goes. And it sounds good, too. It has a little whine. It's not a difficult car to drive around. I'm not working hard. I'm not getting any upper body workout turning it around these corners. I'm not having to press really hard on the brakes to get it to stop. And it's really a pleasure to be driving it. So in that case, I would say that the driveability of the car is excellent. It doesn't require you to be thinking about the driving. If I had any complaints about the wagon, I would say that they had to do with visibility. I don't know why, You'd think it's got all of this glass. I mean, you should be able to see everything. But the A pillars are big, bigger on the inside than you would think from the way they look on the outside because they're pretty delicate on the outside. The mirrors are big. The roof line is low, and the door sills are high. And it ends up feeling really constricted all around you. Like, a little bit of a tunnel, like a paper towel tube, that you're looking through. I was surprised when I got into this car. When I first started driving it, I was a little bit iffy about parking it. Like, well, where are the ends of it? But it actually turns really well. It has a great turning radius. If you want to take somebody out smooth, comfortable, just a nice ride where you can have a conversation, this car is excellent. It's really willing to be in the background of what you're doing, just making it easy and pleasant to be doing whatever that is. There are two kinds of people in the world, wagons ho and wagons no. I am definitely a pro wagon person, so for me a wagon has great memories and has great connotations. I'm a little bit nostalgic for wagons. I remember sitting in the back seat of a wagon. They're fun. They're stylish. They are incredibly useful, and they're a little bit-- kind of a throwback. The thing that you don't get in a wagon is that up high seating position that people seem to really want. So if you were looking at wagons, you need to be prepared to have a car driving experience. It's still going to be a car. It's going to look like a car, and it's going to feel like a car. The technology in this Sportbrake is-- it's not overwhelming. It has a really great sound system. It has a 10 inch touch screen, which is like a horizontal landscape screen here. When you talk value and luxury, things get subjective really quickly. If you want a wagon, you don't have very many choices. If you want a luxury wagon, you have even less. Are you getting the value for that? Well, here's what you're getting that you wouldn't get from a cheaper vehicle, or even from some of the cheaper Jaguar options. For example, you could get the F-Pace little SUV, still have a Jaguar on the front, and have about the same amount of space. You're getting individuality. You're getting a unique vehicle. That's what this car will bring you. People will pay attention to it. If you park it somewhere, someone will stop to talk to you about it. And you're not going to get that with a more common SUV, or even with some of the other luxury sedans. You're going to get it because it's a wagon, and because, as we were talking about with wagons, people like them or they hate them. But there are always people who are going to like them, and they're going to want to talk about it. This is a great car for somebody who drives a lot who travels and carries stuff. This is a great vehicle for a family, because your kids, if they're in the back seat, they're right there. You see them right there, and you're not very far away from them the way that you are in a bigger SUV, or a truck where they're, like, way the heck back there. They can easily pretend they don't hear you yelling at them. This car is all wheel drive, although it is rear wheel weighted. So most of the time when you're driving, it's basically like a rear wheel drive car. And if it feels that you need it, it can move some of that power to the front. Overall, if you've got a smaller family, you really love driving, you want something that'll take it all around the corners and stand out in a parking lot, the XF Sportbrake is probably the car you should be looking at as an alternative to an SUV. But on the other hand, if you've got a big family, you're hauling a lot of stuff, and you're concerned about the value that you're getting for your money, you might want to look at something else. For more information about the Sportbrake or any other wagon or SUV, subscribe to our channel. 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