Innholdsfortegnelse for 13/04/2016 i Autocar

Mercedes-Benz is close to approving a second brand-new standalone AMG model to sit alongside the GT coupé. AMG boss Tobias Moers told Autocar: “My personal thinking is that we are now at a level where we could support another dedicated AMG model.” Moers provided no further clue as to the kind of car it might be, but Mercedes is known to be keen to plug the gap in its line-up vacated by the SLS range, whose prices rose to £230,000 for the Black Series model, double that currently charged for the most expensive GT variant. However, according to Moers, “the car would be totally different to the GT”. Indeed, rather than a traditionally configured, old-school front-engined supercar like the SLS and GT, Mercedes is believed to be considering a cutting-edge,…

ELECTRIC POWERTRAINS offer the chance to “reinvent the car”, according to Jaguar design chief Ian Callum. With Jaguar’s range of EVs expected to be previewed as a first concept next year, Callum said: “My view is that electric cars are a new start. Car design will change more in the next 15 years than it has in the past 100. “The opportunities electric powertrains offer are huge in terms of space. By removing so much hardware and putting the batteries in the floor, you open up all sorts of possibilities. The question is whether to make cars smaller but with the same space, or keep them the same and offer more space.” Callum insisted the opportunities presented by electrification far outweigh the drawbacks. “It offers designers much greater freedom,” he…

Skoda is planning a family of SUVs that could extend to as many as four models, each with a set of design and convenience features to distinguish them from the company’s hatchbacks. The production version of the VisionS concept will be unveiled at the Paris motor show in September and badged Kodiaq. It will go on sale in the UK in late March next year and has already triggered a record 4500 expressions of interest from potential UK buyers. It will be followed by a renewed version of the popular Yeti compact crossover, which will be unveiled late next year or in early 2018. The Kodiaq will be joined by a five-door coupé version inspired by the raked-roof styling of the BMW X6 and X4, although it is not yet…

When McLaren launched the 675LT coupé, it said the car had a substantial breadth of character. That, yes, it was a track-focused variant of the 650S – 100kg lighter, stiffened, honed, poised – but that it was still at the habitable end of the supercar scale. It was, McLaren said, a car that remained comfortable on bad roads and whose seats remained cosy even over long distances. Whose satellite navigation and stereo and air conditioning worked a treat, they said. And then they said: “Here’s Silverstone. Fill your boots.” So we never found out about the rest. Today is different. Today is the chance to see the side of the car that McLaren said existed but that we were too busy exploring the Longtaily side of things to notice. LT,…

PALMER’S SECRET IS ALWAYS TO THINK BIGGER THAN HIS RIVALS DO From the air, the potential of the place hits you between the eyes. It looked breathtaking enough in photographs a few months ago, when Jonathan Palmer first announced that his MotorSport Vision (MSV) group, operator of four race circuits and Bedford Autodrome in the UK, had bought a disused air force base in north-western France with the aim of creating “a huge motorsport village” that would serve the whole of Europe. But now we’re seeing the place, Laon Autodrome, for the first time, spread out below like a gigantic tablecloth as we look down from JP’s Agusta 109 helicopter, and it’s clear mere pictures are no preparation. This is a truly huge site, fenced, secluded and as big as…

Road trip: a phrase loaded with potential for exciting adventures, spontaneous diversions and over-indulgence in service station cuisine. My trek was short on imagination, because I was taking a path up the UK’s motorways from Berkshire to Scotland, but this was the farthest I’d gone in our Civic Type R in one go. When we ordered our car, we specified GT trim, which includes convenience features such as automatic lights and wipers, sat-nav and even one of those old-fangled CD players. And ‘GT’ stands for ‘grand touring’, yes? Well, I wasn’t expecting limo-like refinement, but would this road-going hot rod be bearable over such a long trek? It didn’t start well: the sat-nav recognised my destination’s postcode but then proclaimed ‘cannot calculate route’ — a quirk that no amount of…

READER’S CARS: MERCEDES-BENZ E-CLASS Lawrence Howard thought we might be interested to hear about his 403,000-mile, 2007 Mercedes E 220 CDI Avantgarde, previously used as a taxi on airport runs. “I bought it for £2500 just over two years ago, with 340,000 miles on the clock, as a stop-gap car, initially for six months, but two years later I’m still driving it,” he says. “Other than servicing and things like tyres and brakes, very little has needed to be replaced. A broken spring at the end of last year and a new wheel bearing are about it.” WHAT CAUGHT MY EYE THIS WEEK: RO AD TAX It isn’t funny how, once you get past the middle of the month, you think to yourself, “Nah, what’s the point of taxing a…

5 Family hatchbacks 1 Volkswagen Golf From £17,000 Expensive it may be but there’s enough class here to make the tag look reassuringly precise. A class above. 2 Ford Focus From £14,000 Has a blend of ride and handling that rivals can’t match. One of the UK’s most popular cars for all the right reasons. 3 Seat Leon From £16,000 As always, a Golf in cheaper Spanish drag. Margins are cleverly engineered to show, but this is the best Leon yet. 4 Mazda 3 From £17,000 As ever, it seems, the Mazda aces driveability and efficiency but fails to totally convince in an all-star class. 5 Peugeot 308 From £16,000 No name change, but the appeal of the latest 308 is all new. A serious contender for family hatch money.…

Jaguar freely admits that having the Porsche Macan as a benchmark helped it make a better car The ice lakes of Arjeplog have seen it all. Jaguar and Land Rover have been coming here for the past 30 years: long enough to recall a time when their test site at the lake called Revi had no modern, multi-bay facility for tinkering, but just the landowner’s garage. But there has always been all the space in the world to play in. During that time, in Lapland winters – selected especially for their length and bitterness – the ice has frozen, thawed and refrozen while an evolution of saloons and sports cars has been discharged from the distant gates of Gaydon and Solihull. At half a metre deep, the ice has felt…

‘We’ve taken the design DNA of Jaguar and turned it into an SUV’ According to Scott Dicken, Jaguar Land Rover’s UK marketing director, selling the F-Pace has been a project since the autumn of 2012, when the car was little more than an idea. “Up to today, the Jaguar brand has been about beautiful cars and sports cars. We’re now on a journey to make the product range more relevant to more people.” Despite Jaguar’s stylish, sporting image over eight decades of history, Dicken says initial research found no resistance to the idea of a Jaguar SUV. “If you look at the way the auto industry has segmented, virtually every other auto brand has an SUV in its range, so therefore it’s entirely acceptable to have this product. It’s a…

MARK HODCROFT Body-in-white manufacturing engineer Hodcroft is among the ex-military personnel Jaguar Land Rover helps to get back into employment. He was a maintenance engineer for bomb disposal vehicles, completing a tour in Afghanistan. When offered a 12-year commission, he decided to find a new line of work. “I liked the Midlands and felt it was time to settle down. JLR was at the top of my list,” he says. Hodcroft has been with JLR for two and a half years and is now a manufacturing project engineer for vehicle body side and framing. “The transition was quite easy,” he says, “although you had to learn the language. The main thing is that the ethics and values are the same. You know what’s expected of you.” NATHANIEL NAYLOR Production associate…

‘We decided to be world leaders in driveline, driveshafts and all-wheel drive’ Unless you’ve never travelled in a car, you will almost certainly have made use of the products of GKN and almost certainly without knowing it. Among other things, GKN makes driveshafts and propshafts, the high-strength rods that transfer power from a car’s differential to its wheel hubs, and it has more than a 40% share of the worldwide market for these components. Driveshafts and propshafts may not sound like an especially sophisticated piece of hardware but, as so often with car components, there’s a lot more to it than that. The GKN driveshafts – or sideshafts, as the company calls them – that the F-Pace uses have to withstand the full force of its torque, transmit that torque…

The temperature gauge puts the chill in the air at -26deg C – pretty balmy for mid-January, apparently. On the edge of the Arctic Circle, three Jaguar F-Paces are on a guided tour of one of the many temporary cold-weather automotive testing facilities that mother nature creates, every year, out of the countless lakes around the Swedish municipality of Arjeplog. This particular wintry playground, Revi, is privately owned and has been leased almost exclusively to Jaguar Land Rover for the past 30 years. Easily big enough to eclipse many of Europe’s permanent proving grounds, Revi is used mainly for chassis development and electronics tuning; among its features are two continuous-radius slip pads, a polished mile-straight for testing ABS and traction control, and a variety of handling circuits. On the lake…

AUDI’S LINE-UP of style-led SUVs, spearheaded by the electric Q6 and plush Q8 (see separate story), is set to grow further in three years’ time with the introduction of an all-new Q4 model. The rakish five-seater has been conceived to compete against the upcoming BMW X2, Range Rover Evoque and Mercedes-Benz GLA. The Q4 will sit on the same MQB underpinnings as the second-generation Q3. It is scheduled to follow the Q6 and Q8 into showrooms in 2019 at a price expected to start about £28,000. With the next generation of the Q3 set to grow in size in order to provide space in the range for the recently unveiled Q2, the Q4 looks set to trump its closest rivals on outright dimensions. Although nothing is official yet, Audi insiders…

Jaguar’s head of design says his team is “ready to launch any kind of car” in future — but he emphasises that this doesn’t necessarily mean the firm will launch any follow-up SUV products as part of a family of SUVs alongside the new Jaguar F-Pace. Speculation has suggested that Jaguar is investigating smaller and larger SUV launches as it expands the F-Pace family, possibly creating a car as small as the Audi Q3 and one as large as the Q7. “As designers, our job is to have ideas and represent them, either as sketches, or models, or as more advanced designs, but whether these ever see the light of day is down to other people in the business,” said design boss Ian Callum. “We will explore all sorts of…

Tesla dominated motor industry headlines last week with the launch of its $35,000 electric Model 3 saloon. Within a week, nearly 350,000 deposits had been put down, a level of interest on a different scale even to the Volkswagen Beetle relaunch in 1997, a previous standard-setter in pre-launch mania. But now the hard work begins. The Model 3 is the cornerstone of Tesla founder Elon Musk’s plan to ramp up production at the Tesla factory in Fremont, San Francisco, to an ambitious 500,000 cars a year by 2020, with the bulk (400,000) being the Model 3. The Model 3 will not be in series production until late 2017, so getting near this volume in just 24 months will be a sensation, if only because Tesla has never made more than…

TOYOTA HAS DECIDED to kill off the Avensis at the end of the current model’s lifecycle in the expectation that customers will be tempted by its new hybrid models instead. The Avensis was introduced in 1997 and was given an extensive facelift and diesel power from BMW in 2015. It sold around 20,000 units a year in the UK in its prime. Officials say no decision has yet been made on the Avensis’s fate, but it’s now certain that Toyota’s future strategy does not feature a conventional D-sector model. The Toyota C-HR crossover, unveiled in production form at the Geneva show last month, will be a rival for Nissan’s hugely successful Qashqai, and the larger RAV4 SUV has recently been revamped. Both offer petrol-electric hybrid options, with the RAV4 also…

Few other cars at any price so successfully combine such urgent performance with cosseting comfort The Mercedes-AMG S 63 AMG represents the middle ground in the newly re-established S-Class Cabriolet line-up. Positioned between the S 500 and S 65 Cabriolet, the plush four-seater is due to hit UK dealer showrooms next month. Its £135,675 price pitches it £50,000 below its closest open-top rival, the Bentley Continental GT Convertible Speed. The S-Class Cabriolet shares its basic mechanical package and luxurious leather-lined four-seat interior with the S-Class Coupé. However, in order to accommodate what is claimed to be the largest fabric roof on a current production car, the open-top model adopts a unique windscreen, with greater rake and a more substantial frame for added rollover protection. It also receives a different rear…

TWISTED JE MOTORWORKS THE CHELSEA TRUCK COMPANY ‘To many, the Defender is a way of life. Once you understand what it’s about, you can’t help but love it one way or another’ “The Land Rover Defender isn’t dead. It’s only just getting going.” These are the words of Charles Fawcett, boss of Twisted Automotive, and no, he’s not mad. Fawcett knows a thing or two about Defenders – his company creates bespoke versions of the off-roader for customers the world over – but even coming from someone of his stature, you could be forgiven for thinking them a little far-fetched. “It’s a little bit like ‘life begins at 40’,” he explains. “The car’s been a staple diet for the working man for many years, but now it can become what…

‘The 1030bhp supercar produces 6343lb ft of torque from six electric motors’ Turbine generators are not new – Jaguar’s C-X75 supercar concept was equipped with two – but Chinese research company Techrules is fully embracing the technology. It has confirmed that production of its two microturbine-based range- extended electric supercar concepts, shown at last month’s Geneva motor show, will start within three years. The AT96 (Aviation Turbine) and the GT96 (Gas Turbine) will be made in Europe and the search is on to identify a suitable manufacturing site by the end of the year. A higher-volume city car, also based on the TREV (Turbine-Recharging Electric Vehicle) concept, is planned in the next few years. The supercar variants demonstrate how the patented turbine technology can be configured to run on a…

Once you’ve got over the traction issues, the Corsa VXR becomes properly rapid Today’s hot hatch buyers can rightly feel smug about the amount of choice they have. Not only the choice of a brand, be it a Vauxhall VXR, Volkswagen GTI, Ford ST or Renault Sport, but also the choice of the type of hot hatch you want from a selection of vastly differing characters. The Ford Fiesta ST, for example, majors on handling, while the Volkswagen Polo GTI focuses on sophistication and the Renault Clio RS 200 impresses with its all-round ability. In the case of the Corsa VXR, however, it’s all about big, brash performance. This is the most powerful hot hatch in its class and it wants you to know about it in the way it…

BMW M3 E46 (2001-2006) The BMW M3 has been embarrassing supercars for years, and for a fraction of the cost. The 338bhp 3.2-litre straight six engine is super-smooth, with power being sent through the rear wheels. You’ll be treated to a fantastic howl through the quad exhausts, too, and the car can hit 60mph from rest in a smidgen over five seconds. The M3 has brilliant balance, accurate steering and little body roll and will leave most cars in its wake while carrying four passengers and their luggage in comfort. Make sure your car has been well loved and beware of possible crankshaft failures. We found a 2002 example with 72,000 miles on the clock for £8495. Vauxhall Monaro (2005-2007) The Monaro caused a stir when it first arrived in…

‘The first ideas that went to customer clinics were very car-like. It was very low, like a jacked-up sedan’ The F-Pace was an unusual and challenging project for Jaguar’s design team. Any new model is a serious proposition in the hyper-competitive global automotive world. But when the new model is a type of vehicle a brand has never attempted before, the process of bringing the car to life – from the first thoughts to the final product – is probably the most difficult challenge for a design team. Over lunch on the outskirts of Warwick, four of Jaguar’s most senior designers – the key team involved in creating the F-Pace – talked through the long, painstaking process. Julian Thomson, advanced design director for Jaguar, admits the brand had been kicking…

‘The F-Pace may be a crossover but it’s also a Jaguar, so you’ve got to make it handle that way’ Mike Cross always takes the trouble to find the perfect driving position when he gets behind the wheel. He’s very deliberate about it, making a series of small adjustments as he checks his forward sight-lines, and minutely tweaks each of the three mirrors before testing everything with a couple of quick side-to-side wriggling movements, like a runner finding the perfect position for his feet on the starting blocks. His care is understandable. If you’re Jaguar’s chief engineer, whose job is to decide whether or not every new car possesses an elusive mix of static and dynamic qualities known collectively as ‘Jaguarness’, you’d better make those decisions from a consistent driving…

Finbar McFall has the destiny of Jaguar and Land Rover in his hands. Or, more accurately, in his head and his laptop, for he is Jaguar Land Rover’s global product director, and it’s his task to decide which cars the company makes. He does not determine this in isolation, of course, there being dozens of internal contributors to the process. But he is as important a contributor as the customers themselves. “I’ve got to be the voice of the customer in this business – I’ve got to imagine who will buy it, why they’ll buy and why this car is desirable,” he says, “and together with the wider engineering team make sure that it’s competitive.’’ Ultimately, McFall says that’s about making a car an easy choice for customers, “for head…

‘We wanted to make it as easy to navigate as the devices that people are already going to be familiar with’ Infotainment systems have been getting more powerful for years, but now the best ones are getting smarter as well, and that definitely includes Jaguar’s InControl Touch Pro, an option on the F-Pace. “There’s no point having an incredibly complicated system with lots of features that people never use or even understand,” says Peter Virk, JLR’s director of connected technologies and apps. “We want to make sure that it’s intuitive but also that you can make it do exactly what you want.” Which is why InControl Touch Pro offers an unprecedented amount of customisation. While the raw specs are impressive enough – the 10.2in touchscreen is the biggest in the…

‘With Jaguar, sales is all about the experience. You have to create a rapport with the customer’ If you’ve not been in a premium car dealership for a while it can come as quite a shock, especially if you’re expecting the sort of high-pressure experience the industry used to deliver. These days you’re more likely to receive a baristagrade coffee or even the offer of a free lunch than a spiel about the deal going away in 10 minutes, or any of the other techniques the industry used to be notorious for. “We have people coming in here who think the sales staff are going to jump on them the moment they walk through the door,” says Anthony Hope, brand director for Listers Jaguar Land Rover in Droitwich. “They are…

Audi is set to extend its line-up with a luxurious new SUV called the Q8. The new five-seat SUV will go into production in just over two years’ time. The Q8 will be positioned at the top of the German car maker’s burgeoning SUV lineup. It is set to go head to head with the likes of the BMW X6, Mercedes-Benz GLE and Range Rover Sport at a starting price of around £55,000 for the most affordable model, a Q8 3.0 TDI, in the UK. The Q8 is one of seven new SUV models currently under development at Audi and scheduled for launch before the end of the decade. It joins the all-new Q2, successor models to today’s Q3 and Q5, a new Q1 and Q4, and the all-electric Q6,…

PSA GROUP BOSS Carlos Tavares has dropped a further hint that the all-electric DS E-Tense supercar revealed as a concept at last month’s Geneva motor show could become a production reality by 2021. The four-wheel-drive, carbonfibre-bodied E-Tense is said to be capable of hitting 62mph from rest in 4.5sec and a 155mph top speed while also offering a 220-mile range. DS is setting about proving those claims with the concept, which was built to production specification. Speaking at the launch of the P SA Group’s new ‘Push to Pass’ business plan last week, Tavares promised that the company will introduce “an all-wheel-drive electric technology available in our top-of-the-range cars” some time between 2019 and 2021. Although Tavares didn’t mention the E-Tense by name, an image of the 402bhp Geneva motor…

THE NEXT-GENERATION Jaguar XJ, expected to be launched around 2019, will be “something that is visually stunning on the outside and luxurious inside”, according to design boss Ian Callum. Jaguar Land Rover is believed to have hotly debated the new XJ as it evaluated how to develop a flagship design for the next generation of cars while boosting sales in a class dominated by the Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Discussions are understood to have swung as widely as dropping it from the line-up and developing a large SUV, to sticking with an ultra-conventional saloon. Callum said the next generation could have a higher roofline to improve the rear packaging, but other changes could be more “nuanced”. The decision to stick with a saloon is said to be motivated by it still being…

The BMW M4 GTS is this year’s helping of Bavarian temptation for anyone who’s been in the market for a Porsche 911 GT3 RS or a Mercedes C63 AMG Black Series lately, and who’s ready for a change. What a bind. I’ll file that idea away under ‘nice problem to have’ and get on with the business at hand. Clearly track-intended but road-legal, the M4 GTS is the fastest-accelerating series-production M car to date, pipping an M6 Competition to 62mph by a tenth of a second. It’s also almost exactly double the price of a new M4 Competition. And it’s already sold out. Just 700 will be built, with almost half of those off to the US, where it becomes the first of BMW M division’s special-series models to go…

Out with the old, in with the new. That’s the message Mercedes is extolling with the SLC. Don’t be fooled, though. Despite the change in name, this two-seat compact roadster is actually a mildly facelifted version of the SLK. Among the styling changes are a redesigned front bumper with larger cooling ducts, an altered grille and revised headlights. At the rear, there are new LED tail-light graphics and a reprofiled bumper with a more pronounced diffuser element. Revisions to the folding hard-top allow it to be opened without having to manually set the luggage cover in place. It also operates at vehicle speeds of up to 25mph, so it can now be opened and closed while setting off rather than at a standstill, as was the case with the older…

It was the year the safety pin, the gas mask and the breech-loading cannon were patented, the year the first air raid took place (from a balloon) – and the year Britain’s oldest garage was founded. Garage? Admittedly, 167 years ago, the closest W Ganderton came to horsepower were the horses that pulled the carts and carriages for which the company made wheels. Even so, if you regard a garage as a place where vehicles – be they horseless carriages or carriages pulled by horses – are maintained, then W Ganderton & Son, founded in 1849 and owned and managed by the same family ever since, has a claim on the title of Britain’s oldest. Fittingly, at least in the context of today, it’s in Buckingham, a stone’s throw from…

Nigel Craig is concerned about the list price of the Land Rover Discovery Sport, but I’ve found a great solution (Your Views, 16 March). I put off buying one of the last Freelanders in anticipation of the new car but was amazed at the increased prices, so I bought a Mazda CX-5 instead. The Mazda is good, but it’s not a Land Rover. I’ve just found the solution, though. I’ve ordered a new, outgoing Discovery 4 Graphite. With a discount, it costs less than a top-end Sport and is much more of a car than that will ever be. I’m happy. Ken Glass via email WIN Letter of the week wins a ValetPRO exterior protection and maintenance kit worth £58.95…

The single factor that will do most to set battery electric cars free, experts are always saying, is a meaningful increase in their range. Not only will this boost their usefulness, but it will also shorten the period of popularity of arguably heavier and more expensive plug-in hybrids, seen by most as the low-CO2 stopgap we need on the way to true zero-emissions cars. We agree. It’s why we’ve decided to run a Nissan Leaf on our long-term fleet again, having had one nearly five years ago when the concept was new. The pioneering all-electric Nissan, British-built and now the world’s most popular electric car, has just become available with a 30kWh battery that gives it 25% more on-board power in a package no bigger or heavier than before. As…

Take a risk; that’s the point of what we do when buying cars for recreation Is this car worth buying? Well, it’s always nice to be asked. I followed the link supplied by a reader and ended up looking at a 1995 Toyota Celica, which was also nice. Well, it wasn’t completely. It had no history, it was an import and, as you might expect, there were ‘mods’ — bulges and non-standard parts. Really, though, that isn’t unexpected, given that this Japanese coupé is more than 20 years old. The asking price was pretty much car-buying small change at £900, and you might be able to get a few quid off that to sweeten the deal. So my feeling is if you have the cash, knock yourself out and have…

Autocar’s star ratings explained Inherently dangerous/unsafe. Tragically, irredeemably flawed. Appalling. Massively significant failings. Very poor. Fails to meet any accepted class boundaries. Poor. Within acceptable class boundaries in a few areas. Still not recommendable. Off the pace. Below average in nearly all areas. Acceptable. About average in key areas, but disappoints. Competent. Above average in some areas, average in others. Outstanding in none. Good. Competitive in key areas. Very good. Very competitive in key areas, competitive in secondary respects. Excellent. Near class leading in key areas, and in some ways outstanding. Brilliant, unsurpassed. All but flawless. Any car that has had a full Autocar road test is highlighted in yellow. FOR FULL RESULTS see page 85…

Sport coupés 1 Porsche Cayman From £40,000 Starter Cayman is as good as it gets. Scalpel-blade incisiveness folded into supreme usability. Prettier now, too. 2 Toyota GT86 From £25,000 Who knew Toyota had another masterpiece in it after the Lexus LFA? Fun doesn’t cover it. A life companion. 3 BMW M235i From £34,000 Towers over most obvious rivals. Only by comparing it with BMW’s best ever do the marginal demerits appear. 4 Audi TT S From £38,000 Costliest version gets the deftest chassis ever to underpin a TT — the best reason yet to buy into Audi’s coupé. 5 Peugeot RCZ R From £32,000 The hot RCZ finally delivers the vivid driving experience its appearance always deserved. A serious prospect. Visit autocar.co.uk for all of our Top Fives…

Grant had to approach the loop at 53mph, flat out in second gear; he pulled 6.5g during the three-second stunt Instead of the usual scenario of covers-off and executive speeches about sliced bread being usurped, Jaguar chose to reveal the F-Pace to the world by running it through the highest ever loop-the-loop. On the eve of the Frankfurt motor show last September, stunt driver Terry Grant fired the F-Pace at a 19.08-metre-high ‘0’ in a giant 80 celebrating Jaguar’s 80th anniversary. He made it, and in the process set a new Guinness World Record, the 22nd to his name (he’s since added a 23rd). The previous loop-the-loop record was 18.29m. The stunt was the result of a precise mathematical formula and several months’ planning. Grant had to approach the loop…

“There will be three shifts here now, and phone calls at unusual hours,” says Richard McDonell, senior manufacturing manager of Body Shop 3, the aluminium facility at Jaguar’s Solihull plant. “I quite like the idea,” he adds unexpectedly. “I don’t mind being connected, although we do have a good escalations process.” This means McDonell won’t need to be roused in the small hours unless there’s a serious issue at this quietly humming bodyshop. Quietly humming? Most car body assembly plants pulse to the roar and clatter of machinery and the whipcrack of welders. Not here: despite the fact this bodyshop is becoming noticeably more productive with the introduction of F-Pace panels to its robots and conveyors, the noise levels are subdued apart from the occasional electronic beep of delivery trolleys.…

If you think of the most famous, most glamorous Jaguars, you’re likely to come up with the E-Type, F-Type, and D-Type, plus a few of the racier, landmark saloons. What these all have in common is that they are sleek, long and low, and if you’re of a practical bent you’ll probably note that they’re rather meanly endowed in the boot department. Conjure an image of the world’s SUVs and crossovers, on the other hand, and the recipe is generally the opposite. So, to make a Jaguar crossover that provides voluminous space, the must-have raised seating yet enough of the long and the low to look dazzlingly desirable, stacks up as a sizeable challenge. This was the task faced by several teams at Jaguar when creating the F-Pace, and in…