All New Jaguar F-Pace

The F-Pace brings Jaguar’s  styling and athletic moves to a crowded market and ends up in a compelling place. Powertrains include a standard 340-hp or optional 380-hp supercharged V-6, each with an eight-speed automatic and all-wheel drive.Jaguar is roughly a decade late to the compact-luxury SUV segment, so it’s no wonder company officials sound a bit reluctant about this whole crossover movement. They want to keep steering the discussion of the company’s first SUV,the F

-Pace, back to its sporting credentials and its somewhat tenuous visual and mechanical—and nomenclatural!—connections to the F-type sports car.Jaguar, being part of Land Rover, has equipped the F-Pace with another clever system called All Surface Progress Control – it’s like a cruise control for off-road use, letting you navigate tricky inclines without using the accelerator or brake pedals. When the time comes to go back downhill, the system doubles as a hill descent control and gets the 1,800kg SUV safely back to the bottom with minimal driver inputs.
Jaguar F-Pace design

It’s the first SUV from Jaguar ever, but can the F-Pace put great road manners at the top of its priorities—and make itself what Jaguar calls its most useful sports car?

It all starts with styling. The F-Pace may have an awkward name, but there’s nothing awkward about the way it looks. It’s a handsome SUV that fits right in with the new XF and XE sedans.

The sleek sideview is pure crossover, but the details are pure Jaguar. The F-Pace has a tall mesh grille and signature LED lighting, (full-LED headlights are available)--it's all arranged on a taller plane.

Long vents pierce the front fenders, and the side windows are steeply tapered. At the back there’s a half-circle taillight that echoes the round light pipes on the XE and F-Type.

Jaguar's rotary drive controller rises from the center console, a chrome island surrounded by swaths of piano-black trim. Narrow strips of well-marked buttons run climate and traction controls. As finishing touches, the F-Pace wears polite amounts of aluminum and wood trim and ambient lighting.

The cockpit can come off stark and dark—lighter color choices look better, and wood does, too. The available houndstooth metal trim doesn’t read as well as the real grain or the stock piano-black plastic.

Touchscreens and digital displays factor in conspicuously. There's an 8.0-inch interface on base versions with a streamlined infotainment interface. A more capable system brings a 10-inch center screen with gesture control, and a 12.3-inch screen that replaces the twin-dial gauges with an adaptive display that can switch from "dials" to a full-screen navigation display.