MULTIMEDIA SYSTEM
The F-type’s 10.0in Incontrol Touch Pro touchscreen infotainment system is one area where the car is showing a little length of tooth. It has a configurable home screen, allowing you easy access to the features you use most. You get navigation as standard, with routes plotted using real-time traffic information, and it’s a respectable but unexceptional system by luxury-level standards.
You also get some connected functionality via Jaguar’s Incontrol apps. Hardwire your phone to the USB port, for example, and you can access your Spotify music streaming account via the touchscreen — and there are smartphone mirroring apps for Apple and Android handsets. But Apple Carplay isn’t fitted here, so interfacing with your music and contacts isn’t as easy as it might be. Features such as wireless phone charging and customisable digital instruments aren’t available, either.
The standard 380W 10-speaker Meridian surround audio system was fitted to our car and sounded strong but unexceptional. It can be upgraded to 12 speakers and 770W for £990.
Zf-sourced eight-speed automatic and, for now, it drives the rear wheels exclusively. To get an F-type with a limited-slip differential, you’ll still need to opt for the V6 S, although the 2.0-litre car does get torque vectoring to contain understeer.
Telling the handsome four-cylinder F-type apart from its siblings is all but impossible if you’re looking in your rear-view mirror, because the updated design of the bumper and LED headlights is shared across the range. From behind, though, you’ll notice a chunky single-exit exhaust in the style of Lamborghini’s Murciélago. Under the aluminium skin is double-wishbone suspension that uses non-adaptive dampers with reduced spring rates. Jaguar engineers are known to prefer the lightweight 18in alloy wheels that come as standard, although R-dynamic models – like our test car – get 19s. INTERIOR Jaguar may have dropped the F-type into £50k sports car territory but it hasn’t taken the luxury out of the car. You expect greater touring comfort and a richer interior ambience from this car than you’d find in a 718 Cayman S, and a TT RS or BMW M2. That’s also the primary reason why you’re willing to accept that this car will probably be a heavier and marginally less involving drive than those alternatives: because it’s an affordable sports-car-cum-gt going up against simpler sports cars.
So the first success of the F-type’s stylish, enveloping cockpit is that it has enough leather and attractivelooking trim garnish to mark the car out as a true luxury product, and to make it feel more special than most of the cars that it’s descending the price scale to compete with. The Audi’s Virtual Cockpit infotainment set-up makes the F-type’s look and feel decidedly old hat, it’s true – but that’s a high bar for any luxury car to measure up to. In every other way except perhaps tactile material quality (because Jaguar’s switchgear doesn’t look and feel quite as expensive as it might everywhere), the F-type’s interior conjures the same inviting, sporting, upmarket impression now that it did at its launch four years ago. This remains a great driving environment and a fine place in which to spend time.
There’s enough space in either of the front seats for a 6ft 3in occupant to be comfortable. The standard part-leather seats combine the need for both cushioning and support very well and they position you in an ideal orientation to the controls. There, you feel low to the ground, close to
the car’s roll axis and close to the driven rear axle, as longways-engined sports cars have sited their drivers to useful effect for decades.
The F-type remains a strict twoseater and it’s a little bit short of useful oddment storage around the cabin. Its boot is quite shallow, too, and has a narrow opening. If you tick the relevant option box, you get access to it via what might be the most superfluous powered tailgate anywhere in production. There’s enough room here for a few soft bags or one biggish flight case at a push, but this isn’t the most practical tourer. Between its split cargo areas, a 718 Cayman S offers 30% more carrying space. All of which is the price of the Jaguar’s rakish style, of course – and you’d imagine most owners would gladly pay it. PERFORMANCE For reasons we’ve touched on, it would be unrealistic and unfair to expect this four-cylinder F-type to match the performance level of the often lighter, more powerful and less luxury-minded rivals against which it’s priced. It’s less unfair, though, for the car’s owner to expect a more vigorous showing than you might get from a typical £30k-£40k hot hatch: a 0-60mph mark, for argument’s sake, between 5.0sec and 5.5sec.
If the F-type had achieved Jaguar’s acceleration claim, it would have hit that mark (albeit narrowly) and lifted itself beyond the pace of more humble performance machinery. But in actuality, the car needed 5.7sec to hit 60mph from rest, 14.6sec to hit 100mph and 5.1sec to go from 30mph to 70mph through the gears; which is slower than both the current Honda Civic Type R and Ford Focus RS on two counts out of three and is beaten by the VW Golf R across the board.
Just as a 718 Cayman S isn’t quite in the Jaguar’s league on luxury, of course, neither are any of those hot hatches, but that doesn’t make the comparison entirely spurious. The fact is that this car doesn’t have the potency to be quite as fast as it ought to be, and it doesn’t feel that way, either – even compared with the fourcylinder opposition.
Jaguar’s Ingenium 2.0-litre fourpot sounds just a little bit flat and spikey around idle, and less rich and smooth than any of the F-type’s other motors by some distance. Engage ‘Drive’ and it knuckles down more promisingly, though. It responds smartly to the accelerator, provides a useful if not quite fully forceful-feeling amount of mid-range torque, and sounds at least a little rasping and sporty (helped a fair bit by noticeable engine-note synthesis via the audio speakers). The way the car pulls through the middle of the tacho’s range is swift enough, but there’s a distinct lack of enthusiasm to the way it revs beyond 5000rpm, even by four-cylinder turbo petrol standards. The bottom line is that the rush of urgent acceleration you expect of a Jaguar sports car never really materialises.
The eight-speed automatic gearbox does well to make the most of the engine’s potency – or perhaps to cover for the apparent shortage of it. It shifts quickly and to well within 1000rpm of the redline in manual mode, and intelligently for the most part when left in ‘D’, although not always as smoothly as you’d like. With the transmission in ‘Sport’, it’s quick to respond to a lunge of the accelerator and holds onto lower intermediate gears well, particularly when the Dynamic driving mode is also selected. It’s an automatic gearbox, in short, that enhances the powertrain’s driver appeal although it can do little to fully redeem it. RIDE AND HANDLING Many will look on this car as the runt of the litter but there is certainly credibility to the key claim made by Jaguar’s chassis engineers about the F-type 2.0: that, in some ways, it has better handling and more driver appeal than any of its range-mates. Even though the test car indicated the same 52/48 front-to-rear weight distribution on MIRA’S scales as both the V8 S convertible we tested in 2013 and the V6 S coupé we tested in 2014, it does indeed ride and handle like a slightly lighter, better-balanced take on the F-type concept.
The car may have moved from
adaptively damped to passively damped suspension for this particular execution, but its ride tuning is so clever that you probably won’t notice initially. On the 19in wheels associated with R-dynamic trim, there’s decent low-frequency compliance and a reasonable sense of suppleness at low and middling speeds.
Raise your prevailing speed and the ride certainly firms up, though, and body control becomes much less compromising as the dampers switch their attention from low to highfrequency inputs. At that point, the car takes on the character of a much more simple, old-fashioned sort of sports car. Over bigger intrusions, it struggles to match the deftness and dexterity of its adaptively damped brethren, pitching and jouncing a little and failing to mix ride comfort and dynamic composure quite as cleverly. But the pay-off is a sense of simplicity, honesty and predictability about this car’s chassis that isn’t present in any other F-type. It might not handle a medium-sized bump taken at a certain speed quite as smoothly as a V6, but the way it handles that bump gives you a more dependable idea of what it’ll do over the next one. Moreover, the obvious surfeit of grip over grunt, excellent handling balance and always taut body control makes this feel like a car that’s made to be driven hard.
The power steering isn’t particularly lively with feedback but it has consistent weight and welljudged pace and it suits the car’s purposes well. We didn’t encounter the slight inconsistency of loading under braking that we unearthed on our first drive of this car in Norway earlier this year, but it wouldn’t have been impossible for Jaguar to have tuned out whatever caused the quirk in the intervening period. BUYING AND OWNING Arguably, the biggest threat to 2.0-litre F-type sales is from models higher up Jaguar’s range. People who favour long-legged touring attributes over pin-sharp sports car handling will gravitate towards the British car as opposed to the likes of the Cayman and TT RS, but the step up into big-displacement F-type territory is temptingly slender: a manual V6 costs just £3500 more and sounds rather a lot more arresting.
But then this model’s touring economy approaches the mid-40s, whereas that of the V6 S we tested was low-30s. Owing to the weight lifted from its nose, it also handles more assuredly. Then there’s the fact that although this car is a rival for the Cayman in mechanical and financial terms, for image and road presence it’s more likely to be considered an equal to the Porsche 911, which starts at nearly £78,000 in basic twin-turbo flat six Carrera form. You could put the fantastic new Civic Type R on your drive for the difference.
As for depreciation, the Jaguar is a match for the TT RS, retaining 45% of its value after three years and 36,000 miles, according to our sources. A Pdk-equipped 718 Cayman S betters both, holding exactly half of its value.