[Auto] Jaguar XE

[MehrezVM]

 

It’s now a decade since British sports car and saloon specialist Jaguar chose a motor show stand in Geneva, Switzerland, to tell the world that it was finally taking on one its toughest assignments in modern times: going after the BMW 3 Series. 

This time, unlike with the Ford Mondeo-based X-Type, it would do that with a proper, rear-driven saloon worth its salt. Later in 2014, the extensively aluminium-constructed Jaguar XE met the world’s motoring press in Paris, and production at Castle Bromwich began the following year. 

And now - after for so long trying to compete with arguably the most dominant and successful executive saloon in the world, and lately setting its sights a little lower - the XE is staring retirement in the face. By 2025, we are told, Jaguar’s modern reinvention as an all-electric brand will be up and running - and every one of its old combustion-engined models, this one included, will have been withdrawn from sale.  

So now in its twilight years - and itself like some tribute to a time when Jaguar still harboured ambitions to strike out among Europe’s big-selling premium brands, rather than transforming itself into a zero-emissions luxury player as it seems now intent on doing - what does the XE have to offer today’s executive saloon buyer? And it might it be worth one final fling in a British-built, combustion-engined saloon, before the lights finally go out on Jaguar saloons as we have known them?

 

The Jaguar XE’s showroom fortunes tell a story of great ambition, a few questionable choices, and bad timing on behalf of its maker. 

It adopted the same D7a platform chassis that serves under the XF, F-Pace and the Range Rover Velar and that confers an all-aluminium chassis design (in a class where predominantly steel cars remain the norm), longways engines, double-wishbone front suspension, multiple links at the rear, and a natively rear-wheel-drive layout (with clutch-actuated, electronically controlled four-wheel drive on some models).

 

Ten years ago, that kind of construction was exotic enough to compare fairly favourably with the Mercedes C-Class, BMW 3 Series and Audi A4 of the time. But what’s really interesting to observe is what has happened to the compact executive car market since 2014, and exactly where the Jaguar XE fits into it now. 

 

 

Because although it was slightly small by class standards when introduced, this car’s market positioning has crept down a market segment, while its original rivals have crept up. As we’ll explore more fully later, through model renewals and mission expansions, the BMW 3 Series and its German equivalents have become cars that it’s realistically impossible to pay less than £40,000 for, with many big-selling versions ‘transacting’ much nearer £50k.

While the XE was singularly failing to match the sales volumes of those executive rivals, though, it was slowly amortising its fixed costs, avoiding complication and embracing a relative value advantage that now delivers it to market from little more than £33,000 in entry-level diesel form, and from under £37k even as a fairly potent, mid-range, 247bhp four-cylinder turbo petrol.

It’s probably not by chance, then, that in the new range-topping P300 AWD Sport trim that we’re testing it in in 2024, the XE lines up as an almost exact match on price with Audi’s S3 Quattro saloon and the BMW M235i xDrive M Sport. Both of those Germans are, of course, transverse-engined, natively front-wheel-drive competitors with necessarily higher engine packaging, higher centres of gravity and less equal weight distributions – and both could be said to be derived from hatchback platforms.

Could these be the glory days of Jaguar’s smallest saloon, then? Looking back through its life, there were certainly times when it had more sound and fury. The demise of the AJ126-powered V6 XE S in 2017 is a particular shame - and the short-lived, herocially over-engined Project 8 super-saloon is especially hard to forget.

However you see it, Jaguar has just cut down the XE’s derivative range for possibly one last time. There are now only five models left within it in total. Three rear-driven, mild-hybrid four-cylinder D200 diesels (R-Dynamic S, SE Black and HSE Black, each with 201bhp); one upper-mid-range, rear-drive, R-Dynamic HSE Black P250 petrol; and one final range-topping P300 AWD Sport range-topper. The last of those happens to be the only XE now offered with all-wheel drive, and it’s the only one that gets adaptive dampers as standard (Configurable Dynamics and uprated brakes are optional on lower-level models).

The range-topping XE we tested weighed in at 1740kg on Millbrook’s proving ground scales – 89kg heavier than its homologated kerb weight, but fitted with at least some optional equipment (panoramic glass roof, etc) to explain away the ballast.

 

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