The price is right for Jag’s purr-fect SUV

HERE is little doubt that the new Jaguar F-Pace is a good looking motor possibly the best mid-size SUV design on our roads comments from colleagues as soon as it arrived on the company car park at Motors HQ and continued to draw admiring glances throughout the week.

But it had one very stern test to pass - taking four aging Porsche/ Mercedes/Range Rover owing petrolhead fans to the NEC Classic Car Show in Birmingham.

These are hard people to impress but the F-Pace passed with flying colours - whisking us to Birmingham and back in comfort and style with a long list of standard and optional extra luxuries on board.

Also impressive is the price - as the R-Sport is from £41,330 on the road - although those nice people at JLR had loaded on a comprehensive extras list which added a whopping £15,000-plus, upping the total for this car to £56,940.

Now that’s a lot of cash in anyone’s language but compare it against the opposition and the Jag fares quite well.

In total there are seven engines available in the F-Pace: three petrol and four diesels. The fourcylinder units are Jaguar’s latest Ingenium power plants, while the larger units are all V6s. The petrol range comprises a 2.0-litre turbo unit in 250PS and 300PS forms, while the F-Pace S has a 380PS supercharged V6.

Our car also had Jaguar’s excellent eight-speed automatic transmission, while the less powerful versions can be had with a six-speed manual and rearwheel drive. The rest of the range has 4WD as standard.

Trim-wise the current line-up comprises Prestige, R-Sport, Portfolio and S and, contrary to popular legend, the F-Pace does not share architecture with sister cars from Land Rover but has underpinnings taken from the XE and XF, meaning it feels remarkably car-like to drive.

Also there’s lots of lightweight aluminium so the F-Pace is just as at home crusing the motorways or on twisting back roads. There’s lots of grip, surprisingly little body roll for a large-ish SUV and road and wind noise are minimal.

While we did not get chance to try the F-Pace off road reports are that it is more than capable of getting through anything this type of city-based SUV will ever have to face so occasional adventures off the beaten track should not be a problem.

The F-Pace range starts from £34,730, which is excellent value for money, and tops out at the 3.0 litre V6 380PS supercharged AWD auto version, which is from £53,365 on the road. Our F-Sport is somewhere in the middle but with lots of standard kit stacks up well against the German opposition.

So the F-Pace was a big hit and ticked all the right boxes (apart, surprisingly, from the cruise control not being adaptive) and it was a wrench to hand it back… until I saw what the nice man from JLR had brought in its place - a £73,000 all new Range Rover Velar R-Dynamic HSE D300.

Watch this space!