Features

So we're sitting in the back of the new Jag XF in the middle of nowhere and the three of us are talking about Jag's freshly rediscovered sense of confidence. "Everything changed after XK," says Richard Parry-Jones, retiring chief technical officer at Ford.
"That car's success, internally and externally, gave everyone the right to believe again. I think what you see inside here are designers enjoying themselves again."

Then he says, his passionate pistol-crack Welsh vowels hammering home the point, "There's a lovely sense of fun, even of irony in here..." As he does so, he lovingly fingers the little blood-red starter button (which by now has started to pulse and to pump, to throb gently).

A slightly firmer push, and the 4.2-litre V8 engages and, as it does so, the fat circular knob that selects gears raises out of the console. Slowly, confidently, firmly. Parry-Jones pauses, smiles, hauls in breath as rapidly as he throws out words, "Well, maybe not quite irony yet..."

It doesn't matter whether you think the XF starting procedure is gently ironic or deeply symbolic (oh, come on, guys...), the fact is that people have had fun in here; the way the air vents spin around from their at-rest blank fascias when you switch on; or the messed-with Union Flag that preludes the still-best-in-class systems interface display; the touch-sensitive lights, with their pale-blue cocktail bar cast.

Hell, even the fact that there's more wood in here than ever before in a Jag (yes, apparently despite the omnipresence of all that alloy). It all doesn't matter. This is a great interior, delivered with great confidence.

Don't ask me how I know, but this a great car, delivered with great confidence. I'm blown away by it. And I wasn't at first.

We'll get to what I now know about the way the XF drives later. (It's good, it's good, it's really good, but since we don't get to really drive the car for a couple of months yet, I don't want to make too much of that just now, OK?). In the meantime, I want to talk about the way the car looks.

It is of course an 'Ian Callum car', the latest in a line from the official supplier of dreams for young boys' bedroom walls, whose previous hits include Astons DB7 and DB9, Vantage and Vanquish. Meanwhile, XF is Callum's second Jaguar - like his first, the XK, it doesn't grab you like the Astons. Not immediately anyhow.

But if you, like many others, didn't feel your jaw drop when you first saw the XK but now can't pass one by without turning your head, then the rest of your body, then find yourself stopping in your tracks to lech at its sensual body, then give the XF some time. It is just as good.

The key to seeing the Jaguar in the XF, and not the Lexus (as some unkind souls have suggested), is to look at the front and the rear of the car and, in particular, the extremities of the nose and tail.