NEW XF As you walk up to

NEW XF As you walk up to your new Jaguar XF from the rear, your hand rising and reaching for the driver’s door handle, you might recognise in the radius at the end of the bonnet the ghost of the very first sports saloon, Jaguar’s Mk II from the 1960s. For anyone who knows that icon, seeing this familiar curve in a car as modern as the new XF is uncanny. This is an utterly modern design, a car whose physical form, like the performance and technology it packages, looks to the future. But the skill of Jaguar’s director of design Ian Callum and his team is such that they can incorporate these subtle references without compromising the new XF’s modernity. They’re having fun. And they have created a car that, like all good design, looks great now, but will continue to reveal more details like this, the longer you live with it. The outgoing Jaguar XF has already become one of those iconic Jaguars. “So we decided quite consciously to evolve it,” begins Callum. “The first XF transformed the brand and got this new, modern design language across,” says Adam Hatton, tasked by Callum with overseeing the new XF’s exterior. He also worked on the first one. “I think the mark of good car design is that when you’re replacing it, it still looks good on the road and sells well. So this isn’t the time to revolutionise the XF. Rather, we want to build on everything that’s great about it.” Of course, since that first XF appeared in 2007, much has changed. The more compact, sporting XE saloon has just arrived, allowing the bigger XF to mature slightly. And Jaguar’s huge investment in new technology has brought lightweight aluminium construction, the advanced new four-cylinder Ingenium engines made by Jaguar in its new engine plant, and a series of new, driver-focused technologies, from the class-leading new InControl Touch Pro infotainment system, that enables much greater levels of connectivity to All Surface Progress Control, which allows drivers to pull away at low speed with confidence in slippery conditions (the new XF is the first in its segment to offer this). You can read the technical advances that the new XF makes in its forms and proportions. The new intelligent Aluminium-Intensive Architecture that underpins it is exactly that: an architecture, not a fixed ‘platform’ over 18 j THE DYNAMIC ISSUE

THE ‘SIXTH LIGHT’ AND THE MORE FORMAL DECK OVER THE BOOT ARE PROBABLY THE MOST STRIKING CHANGES TO THE NEW XF