WHAT IS AN ARJEPLOG?
It’s not a word we soft Western Europeans are meant to wrap our mouths around. And it’s not a place we’re naturally equipped to survive, either. But Arr-yuhplug is one of the most important places your new car visits, in gnarled prototype form, before it ever reaches your driveway. It’s a cold-weather-testing wonderland of perma-snowed roads and lakes topped with ice a metre thick, and every major manufacturer decamps hundreds of thermal-shod engineers to this
remote outpost every winter to make sure that, come the frst frost, your car is more reliable than your preferred airline, train or smartphone. Jaguar had to lean on a Swedish hamlet to install a city-spec electrical grid transformer to turn its existing cold-weather boot camp into an EV’s Arctic Circle nightmare. It had to build 200 I-Pace prototypes, send some to Dubai to check the cold-weather set-up didn’t knacker the car in the desert, and a feet here for vice versa. Along the way, they had to switch camoufage because phosphor-blue and black is what Dubai’s police force uses for cop cars. The reward will be beating Mercedes’ EQ range, the Audi e-tron and the Porsche Mission E to market as the frst Teslafghting premium, electric family car.
When it’s fnished. That’s up to Steve Boulter, the I-Pace’s vehicle integration manager. “This car is my baby,” he says from somewhere within a huge ski coat.
Because Jaguar is coming at this EV game afresh, every decision is a frst, and a big one. Take the glycol cooling system that surrounds the foor-mounted batteries. Steve explains that while a normal combustion engine is happiest with coolant at around 90°C, batteries are like a human body. Batteries prefer 20–30°C.
“Aircon and using the heater are the biggest challenges for range depletion”, explains Steve. “Warming the battery when it’s –30°C uses a lot more energy than cooling it down when it’s in 40°C heat.” Though no one from Jag wants to go on the record about Tesla’s build quality issues or failure to keep up with Model 3 demand, there’s a palpable sense of “our customers aren’t the beta testers for the I-Pace – we are” about the operation.
Since I’ve mentioned the T-word, we should cover of how the I-Pace difers from Elon Musk’s brainchild. Early on in the I-Pace’s development, Jaguar made the bold decision it would do everything in-house. Own-brand motors, batteries, and a new platform. Not an F-Pace chassis with bits of Dell laptops shoved inside.
Without getting too Big Bang Theory on you, Jag’s gone for permanent-magnet type motors, not induction motors, and a single-speed transmission. Each wheel can torque-vector by braking, and the car’s ECU can mimic the transfer of drive between axles you get in a conventional 4x4, only at light speed compared to, say, an F-Pace.
Jaguar says the 400bhp drivetrain nails 0–62mph in 4.0secs, and the range is set to be at least 310 miles on the NEDC test cycle. The I-Pace is conspicuously free of anything intimidating to a new EV adopter. “It’s supposed to be a Jaguar that happens to be powered by electricity, not another EV but with a Jag badge,” says Adam.
So, it needs to be a driver’s car. Superb ride and handling balance, even on cruddy roads. We know the I-Pace has pace and space. What about grace?
On the handling circuit, wearing simple all-season tyres, the e-Jag feels planted, thanks to its centre of gravity hanging 120mm lower than an F-Pace’s. The pair of motors is near silent. Power delivery is predictably instant. On-demand torque with no gearbox kickdown or turbo lag to worry about means the I-Pace is saveable from some very severe angles.
What can I tell you that’s actually relevant to driving one on the road? Well, the steering has a typically oily movement and directness. It also appears to ride the ridges in the compacted ice professionally, but there’s still fne-tuning to be done. Hopefully it won’t ride as poorly as an F-Pace does on 22s.
Jaguar has promised a 0–80 per cent charging time of 45mins, via a DC 100kW charger. That’s important, because the I-Pace will work with standard chargers shared with all other EVs except Teslas, and there’ll be no Supercharger-esque bespoke network. With EVs, 0–80 per cent charging is rapidly overtaking 0–60mph as a priority.
The evidence will become clear not this time next year, after the I-Pace’s swelling pre-order books have been attended to, but in three or four years, when every model in Jag’s range has a hybrid version, and the I-Pace no longer has the all-electric market to itself. If the testing, the team’s fngers and frosted eyebrows have been worth it, they’ll be phoning up the council here to ask for another heavy-duty transformer…
“Power delivery is predictably instant”