Not Your Average Diesel

Jaguar Makes Magic With Small-bore Turbodiesels
 

- Jeff Zurschmeide

Jaguar is one of the legendary sports car brands of Great Britain, and they’ve been making great racing and touring machines since 1922. But in almost 100 years, Jaguar has never made an SUV—until this year. The 2017 Jaguar F-Pace is taking the world by storm, with good reason.

The F-Pace offers a 2.0-liter turbo diesel engine that is common to both the SUV and to the all-new Jaguar XE compact luxury sedan. At first glance, two liters looks awfully small to power a mighty Jag, but that’s where the magic happens. The little diesel makes 180 horsepower and 318 lb-ft of torque. When you put that power through Jaguar’s well-tuned 8-speed automatic transmission, you get 0-60 times of about 7.4 seconds in the XE and 8.2 seconds in the F-Pace.

But even those statistics don’t tell the whole performance story. To really get a feel for what Jaguar has done with the diesel engine, you have to drive these vehicles. The 8-speed transmission means you’re always in a good gear for the torque provided by the engine, so both the XE and the F-Pace have no trouble accelerating onto the freeway or making a pass on a mountain road.

I first drove both the XE and the F-Pace up in the Colorado mountains, and I’ve been in both models again since then.

THE DELIGHTFUL JAGUAR XE DIESEL SEDAN

The XE is Jaguar’s latest of several attempts to come up with an affordable compact luxury vehicle, but it’s the first one that really puts the Jaguar driving experience into the equation. The diesel engine’s power profile fits perfectly into the Jaguar world. The XE is as smooth as a Jaguar should be, but it’s also nimble and responsive. The engine is quiet, but you’ll really feel the 318 lb-ft of torque under your foot.