Road test: Jaguar XF is the best of British – come rain or, er… rain

IF THIS picture is giving you a weird feeling of déjà-vu, don’t worry – we featured this very XF, a 2.2-litre diesel Portfolio model, back in August, when Jaguar was kind enough to let us tramp around the roads of Perthshire in it for a couple of hours.

It rained that day. Actually, it rained a lot and, perhaps sensing that we hadn’t seen the car at its best, Jaguar sent it north again at the start of October so we could get better acquainted.

So, here we are again, the baby Jag and I, and it’s still raining. How this car must hate its sorties to Scotland. If it’s all right with you, I’m going to park at the roadside while I wait for the clouds to pass and take a closer look at what £43,050 buys you.

I may have mentioned the air vents before, but I’m going to mention them again. They open and close with a musical whirr that sounds divine. Totally over-the-top, but utterly engaging. I hope whoever designed them got a promotion to the board.

Portfolio trim marks this Jaguar out as pretty posh, and ours comes with charcoal grey soft-grain leather seats, “figured ebony” wood trim, 19-inch alloy wheels, dual-zone climate control, a thumping stereo, and so on. More importantly, you get the feeling that it’s all been put together by people who know exactly what they’re doing and take pride in doing it just right. OE11 GEJ has had a couple of thousand miles added to its odometer since we last met, yet it still looks factory fresh. So, let it rain. I’m in no hurry to get out.

The big story, however, is what’s under the bonnet. A 2.2-litre, four-cylinder diesel engine might not sound terribly exciting, or terribly “Jaguar” for all that matter, but it really is a big deal. Sales of the XF have been hamstrung by the lack of a smaller-capacity, tax-and-fuel-bill friendly diesel, so the 2.2 is here to plug that gap. It’s not as silky-smooth as its three-litre V6 oil-burning cousin, but it’s almost as powerful and significantly more economical. It also transmits its power to the rear wheels via the same eight-speed automatic gearbox as its bigger-engined twin. In fact, if it wasn’t for the 2.2’s slight diesel rattle at low revs, you’d struggle to tell which version you were sitting in.

The XF is a fabulous showcase for the best of British engineering nous and craftsmanship. I hope we meet again one day.