Jaguar XJ: The Hottest Cat on the Road

Jaguar XJ

I clearly remember the moment nearly one year ago when I first laid eyes on Jaguar's new XJ sedan, and felt as though I'd been impaled on some gorgeous aluminum tusk. What a fantastic looking automobile. On any aesthetic scale you'd care to calibrate—modernity, chic, formal grace, raw carnality—this thing simply obliterates the competition, just grinds their bones. Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of Bavarians.

From that moment until this week, when I finally slid behind the wheel of the company's flagship sedan, I sort of held my breath. Recent Jaguars—the XK coupe and XF sedan—have been very decent cars but always felt as if they missed greatness by a few millimeters. The 2011 XJ couldn't possibly, as a machine, live up to all this sculptured sin.

It does. Actually, it's a monster. Hugely civilized, desperately fast, drenched in high-tech amenities and executed with the kind of spirit and joie de vivre than makes the competitive German products look positively Amish, the new Jag is now the presumptive favorite in the full-size premium sedan category. Put another way: If you buy anything else you need a dog and a white cane.

Of course, Jaguar—a relatively small firm and a veritable fountain of red ink, now owned by the Indian conglomerate Tata—does not have the engineering resources of Audi, BMW or Mercedes-Benz. BMW probably has 100 engineers working on coin holders and glove-box dampers. The Jag doesn't offer the tomorrow tech of the Lexus LS600h hybrid. The XJ's lusty 5.0-liter V8s—naturally aspirated (385 horsepower) or supercharged (470 hp or 510 hp)—are not quite as highly evolved as BMW's twin-turbo powerplants, nor does the car offer as many forward gears as the eight-speed 7-series (the Jag has only six gears). I suppose in a five-way geek-off comparing the cars' navigation and multimedia consoles, the Jag's might not be quite as intuitive and refined.