Jaguar XK Road Test

Jaguar XK

What We Liked

• The exhaust note
• The exterior Styling
• The Grand Tourer performance

What We Disliked

• The radio ariel which has been revised, and in the future will be in the rear spoiler.

What We'd Like To See

• Better quality interior trim, there are too many plastics for our liking

Build Quality

We did not have any concerns about the overall build quality of the Jaguar XK, but we did not like the plastics used in the cabin. We felt the plastic surrounds for the window controls and Satellite Navigation were particularly poor. Although we did like the aluminium trim which should have been used across the interior.

Value For Money

The base car floats around the £60,000 mark, using Jaguar’s online car configurator it wasn’t hard to spend an extra £6,000 on options that most people would want to add. The equivalent BMW 6 Series is around £ 5,000 less and a Porsche 911 can be bought for a little over £60,000 both the 6 Series & 911 are quicker cars but neither have the road presence of XK.

Overall Opinion

We drive a mixed bunch of cars every year and no other car has come close to stirring our emotions as the Jaguar XK did during our test week.

We were never that keen on the old XK8 but this is a totally different car, the XK is a very capable grand tourer. It does have some short comings, some of the interior finishes are not what you would expect and performance wise the XK is lacking a little when compared with the BMW 650 and Porsche 911.

The question we always ask is would we buy one, and usually it is a case of yes we would or no we wouldn’t -  but with XK we just couldn’t make our minds up, if we wanted more performance we would look at the Supercharged XK and would probably be very happy. The XK has charisma where the German rivals are all too clinical, they may be technically more advanced and arguably better cars but they do not have lineage, which for us is important, we like to feel special.

Therefore, the Jaguar XK comes highly recommended.

Jaguar XK