The Vehicles Earth

A couple of years back I had the underwhelming experience of running a Honda Insight for a few months. I quite liked it but, as is often the case round here, I was heaped with opprobrium for taking the side of a car everyone else hates. My point was not that the Insight is inherently a good car, but that it makes you adjust your behaviour, tone down your driving style, become more relaxed, more eco-compatible behind the wheel. Those who hated the Insight did so because they tried to drive the rims off it as if it was an M3, and were infuriated with the paucity of reward.

What has this to do with our long-term Jaguar XF 2.2D? The principal is the same. Although the XF is no Insight, it seems to be a Jaguar without a Jaguar’s sense of hurry, being both slow and rather unemotional in its appetite for the horizon. And initially that counts against it. The expectation wrought from its adept looks and modernist interior makes the first prod of the accelerator a bigger disappointment than your first sexual encounter. And if you lose patience and try to press harder this 16-valve four-pot displays the manners of a cornered cat in resisting your advances. Nought to 60 in 8.0secs? There are Toyota Avensises capable of matching that.

But the XF, like all Jaguars (and all classy women, come to that) needs to be finessed. If you adjust your mindset, ease back on the right foot, give the engine the time it needs to rustle up its cheeky little torque number (332lb ft is plenty creamy enough, if not the full Nigella) and accept that squealing off the line isn’t going to get you there any quicker, then it works. That’s when Jaguar’s peerless qualities of fine ride, blissful cabin refinement and suave ambience make themselves known. And suddenly it all makes sense.

The Honda Insight taught me how to revel in this kind of motoring. But I’d much rather be driving an XF than an Insight.

By Greg Fountain