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Jaguar Sportbrake: The chicken tikka masala of van-sized posh cars

Indian-owned Jag's latest offering curries favour with us

Vulture at the Wheel I had a rationale behind reviewing the Jaguar XF Sportbrake. Imagine you are an IT consultant. Now imagine you’ve done pretty well for yourself. Still with me? Good. Narrow that down to being the type of consultant who still does real things with hardware. Not just org charts, “strategy” and managing resources.

Jaguar Sportbrake. Pic: Simon Rockman

The Jaguar Sportbrake: Long and stylish

You’ll have boxes to take to clients. Servers, thin client boxes, displays, and the odd Network Attached Storage. If you need to move a NAS, this is the NAS Car for you. Sorry.

The car on tests here is the 3.0 Diesel Sportbrake. That’s a turbocharged V6 putting out 240hp (177kW), with 369lb/ft (500Nm) of torque married to an eight speed automatic gearbox. Jaguar claim it'll manage 0-60mph in 6.7 seconds and a top speed 1mph shy of 150. The base price is £42,895 and the test car had a tad under £5,000 in options.

In the front the XF Sportbrake is an excellent place to be. In the back is bigger than many MPVs. And I tested it to the max. Any antique dealers reading this might be happy to know that I got a large chaise longue into the back, mobile phone dealers might appreciate that I transported 140 Doro 614s from Swansea to London without having to put the seats down and the sporty types will like the fact that two bikes and weekend bags fitted for a trip to Suffolk with enough room for a trip to a farmers' market on the way home.

Jaguar Sportbrake with a chaise longue in the boot

Roomy: The aforementioned chaise longue in situ. Swallowed like a hungry lion finding a gazelle carcass

There is a 12v socket tucked back there too. I didn’t actually have a NAS with me, so you’ll have to go and read something by Chris Mellor for that.

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