Jaguar X-Type

Jaguar X-Type

Here are my impressions, now that it is out of the body shop, and I have a bit more chance to drive it. A friend described his Jaguar as the most comfortable car he has ever owned for high speed travel. I agree. It's not a sports car--but it is a very comfortable ride without being soft. It has road feel. You can tell when you are changing from one road surface to another, and it corners with great certainty and aplomb. But it is never harsh.

My wife (who has always found the Jaguars to be very attractive) says it is the quietest car in which she has ever ridden. Tire noise is by far the biggest problem--and that's almost nothing, except on a few roads where there is some interaction between the tread of the all season tires and the pavement. It is far more quiet than the Corvette, of course, but it is even more quiet than the 2000 Impala LS that I owned, and I would say as quiet (or perhaps more quiet) than the Cadillac CTS I rented in Ohio a couple of years back.

The Jaguar does not have the gut wrenching torque of the Corvette, of course. The saying that there is no substitute for cubic inches is really true. The Jaguar has a 3.0L V6; the Corvette has a 5.7L V8--and the Corvette weighs several hundred pounds less, as well. But the Jaguar is very responsive, and the five speed automatic transmission is really quite effective at finding the right gear when you stomp on the accelerator--it has a lot of choices to pick from when you are in top gear!

As of last night, we were just about out of snow, and there was nothing on the roads down in the Boise area, so I was able to try the Jaguar out a bit more on dry roads. It corners well--not with the "my stomach is trying to move outside my body" force of the Corvette, but the full-time 4WD system means that the Jaguar feels extremely surefooted as it goes around corners in a way that the Corvette does not. The Corvette will certainly outcorner the Jaguar, but the Jaguar feels very calm and collected at its ultimate cornering limits; the Corvette, at its much higher cornering limits, requires a lot more care and attention to avoid at least embarrassment, if not worse.

Compared to the Corvette (at least my 2000 Corvette), there are some areas where the Jaguar feels a bit primitive. I've gotten so used to the heads-up display on the Corvette that looking down at the dash to read the speed from a dial seems positively twentieth century. In addition, the Jaguar's speedometer is a bit harder to read than the Corvette, with divisions too close together. What is especially unfortunate is that the Jaguar has a 150 mph speedometer, even though it is speed governed to 122 mph--but I think that they were trying to share the speedometer with the Sport model, which I believe may have had a 140 mph governor to go with the higher speed tires. (Or tyres, as the Jaguar manual likes to call them.)

I really like the steering wheel mounted stereo controls--but unlike the 2000 Impala LS which also had such controls, the Jaguar's channel selection button only advances through the button presets--you can't use the channel seek without reaching over to the dashboard. On the plus side, you can set at least nine button presets per band, which should be enough. Except, of course, that Bend has different stations than Boise.

One surprise to me is that the Jaguar has sensors in the back of the car that detect when you are within 12 inches of something--useful for avoiding parallel parking embarrassments (not that this could ever happen to me, of course), and backing into walls. There was an option for this on the front end as well, but mine does not have this option.

Heated seats with memory settings were also an option that sounds pretty neat, but I thinking having a remote starter installed might be a more cost effective way to make it tolerable climbing into leather seats when it's 25 degrees outside.

When you turn on the defroster, it also electrically heats the side view mirrors, which should both remove snow and fog.

The salesman tells me that the 2005 X-Type manual is no longer available--and he remains quite sure that it was in the car when we picked it up. The body shop doesn't know where it went, and claims that they would not have had any reason to look at it, which makes sense. My only other option is the PDF on the Jaguar website. I pulled it into Adobe Acrobat, used the Crop tool to cut it down ot the actual contents of the printed pages, then used Adobe Reader 8.0 to print it in booklet mode.

The trick to making this work well is not to print all 200 pages as a single booklet--then you end up with a very thick wad of paper all folded over. Instead, I printed it in 32 page chunks, double-sided, so that I now have a series of fasciles, each of which is relatively thin and easy to open, which tomorrow I will have Kinko's bind. This is very much the way that real books are printed--a series of individual chunks, which are then bound together.

The garage isn't big enough for the Jaguar, the TrailBlazer, and the Corvette, so the only sensible choice was to put the cars that we drive daily inside. The Corvette is now sitting under a car cover on the back driveway, whimpering and whining that it isn't good enough to sleep indoors with the newer cars. If I can get a permanent job--or maybe if I just feel a bit more willing to spend some money this summer--I'll have a separate two car garage/workshop built on the south part of the platform, and then the Corvette, the machine tools, and the telescopes can go in there.