Top Gear Test Drive Directory: don't buy a car without it

It has just been announced that Ford has sold Jaguar (along with Land Rover) to Indian motor manufacturer, Tata. It's 18 years since Ford bought the company and much has changed. What it bought in 1990 was a company that offered huge potential but poor products.

Fast-forward almost two decades and Tata is still getting that potential but also one of the best product lineups in the premium sector. And the final piece of Jaguar's renaissance jigsaw is the new XF, and, as we discover in this issue, it really is the car that will finally take on the mighty BMW 5-Series and Mercedes-Benz E-Class. Fast, well built and with a sumptuous interior, it's everything an executive should be.

Other new cars in this month's TGTTD aren't quite as prestigious but are still improvements in their own right. Firstly, it's not an easy task to make a budget car feel more expensive than it is, especially when it comes from an historically budget manufacturer.

And yet this is exactly what Hyundai has done with its new i10. It's no Fiat 500, we admit, but it's still modern and contemporary; not something we ever said about its predecessor. Secondly, the old Vauxhall Agila was a car that hardly made a blip on our radar it was so poor. However, the new model is as far away from the old one as the XF is from the smokey, unreliable XJ6s of the Eighties.

So with these and every other new, mainstream car on sale assessed by our team of experienced road testers plus thousands of used car prices from our friends at Glass's and buying advice from a real life used car trader, Top Gear Test Drive Directory really is everything you need to buy your next car.