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Big cat diary
We drive the new Jag XK down in the Cape to find out whether one car can really be worth so much hype
You don't have to wait much longer now, I will get to how good or otherwise this car is inside a couple of paragraphs (as if you don't already know - there are very few dissenting opinions about the new Jaguar XK). But let me tell you first how much it matters what we think, and how it matters rather more what you think.
Let's get this straight, the success or otherwise of the XK will not decide Jaguar's future. Sure, Jag will make a lot of money on each car - more than it does on a similarly aluminium-intensive XJ - but it won't sell that many of them.
That's not a bleak forecast of failure, just the simple fact that in Jaguar's re-aligned future, where Porsche and not BMW is the role model, the XK is a niche car in a niche line-up.
No, the car that matters will be the replacement for the S-Type. When that goes on sale in 2007, Jaguar will need to sell two of those for every one XK if it is to survive.
'Let's get this straight, the success or otherwise of the new XK will not decide Jaguar's future'
But the XK does matter. The last decade has been just horrible for the people that have fashioned the modern Jaguar, some of them victims of their own chutzpah, most of them not.
The comparative failure of the ungainly S-Type and the total failure of the cynical X-Type has left them skinned alive, tender beyond words, in desperate need of a new epidermis, protective layer that can begin the healing process and allow them to look ahead with confidence.
The XJ could have been that car; given a funky, future-looking, tech-intensive interior, its 'vintage' [that's 'vintage' as in "It's vintage Valentino, dahling" not as in London to Brighton run... just] exterior could have been seen as the most arch of understatements. Instead the interior is all that terrible, old farts' club, J-gate and Spitfire wing nonsense.
So, sublime ride and handling or not, it feels plain old before its time. The XJ could have been that car. The XK categorically is. It is all of these things: cool, clever, innovative, youthful, grown-up, nimble, muscley, deeply involving. It is state of the art in terms of powertrain and way ahead of it in terms of structure.
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