Jaguar XF Sportbrake
Our versatile luxury estate has lived up to the finest traditions of the Jaguar brand, and then some
Final thoughts on our used luxury estate
I NEVER KNEW my grandfather, because he passed away long before I was born. As a result, the pictures I have of the man in my mind have been painted by the memories shared by my dad – and they invariably contain a Jaguar.
My grandpa owned a succession of Jaguar Mk2s, a model that has since become an icon of the 1960s and which the XF saloon is the modern successor to.
Dad himself always dreamed of owning a Jag, too, and later in his career it was something he might have been able to do, had the right car existed. However, when I was a lad we had dogs, and there was no model in the company’s range that was practical enough to suit our needs.
It wasn’t until 2012 that Jaguar finally introduced an estate version of the XF, called the Sportbrake, and running the secondgeneration model for the past few months has really shown me what my dad missed out on.
Handsome, luxurious and enormously practical, it’s also great fun to drive, with fluid, well-weighted steering, masses of traction from its four-wheel drive system, and an automatic gearbox that can work like a proper manual, holding on to gears when you ask it to.
The engine is fabulously flexible, too, with monstrous performance and a voracious appetite for motorway miles, its refinement marred only by a dose of road noise at speed.
When bought used, the XF Sportbrake is even relatively affordable, with the first owner having taken a hefty hit on depreciation that should slow down in the coming years. Shop around and you can land one with plenty of choice extras thrown into the bargain, as I did.
Don’t expect it to be cheap to run, though; around town, my car’s 296bhp petrol engine could return as little as 16mpg, although that rose as high as 34.2mpg on the motorway.
The car hasn’t been without its technical faults, either. A sensor failed in the heating system; the infotainment crashed several times, and sporadic use during lockdown led to regular battery discharge warnings.
So, yes, it’s flawed, but it’s so easy to forgive those issues every time you get behind the wheel – whether that’s for a long motorway hack, a cross-country blast on a favourite B-road or even to lug a large piece of furniture.
Every element you interact with as a driver is beautifully resolved, and it’s a car with real character. A proper Jaguar, in other words. I’m sure grandpa would have approved.