Jaguar I-Pace

Not at all, just curious. And it’s not a very tall SUV, and I’d hope the low-down battery weight would counteract the topply, jiggly feeling that makes me dislike driving a tall vehicle.

Question is, for maximum fawning from the sales team, do I arrive in the ‘prestigious’ CLS (which is what I entered in ‘current car’ part of the enquiry form) or the electric i3? I don’t suppose they’ll actually notice either way.

I would imagine that they see a CLS owner as part of their target market. Perhaps more likely to be changing their vehicle to an electric Jag than someone who already has an EV.

I would think the CLS.

Waiting time is well into 2019 now.

Real range is probably around 220 miles.

Don't waste your time trying to haggle.

I expect if you drive it you will want it, and getting back into the i3 will be a disappointment!

I know that I'm the only pauper on here who has to consider PCPs/leasing, but if you fancy an I-Pace for £400 a month then act quickly.

www.fleetprices.co.uk/personal-lease-cars/jaguar/i-pace-4x4/i-pace-suv-00-electric-90kwh-400-s-5dr-auto-362127699

I went. I drove it. And now I want one.

What did I like? Very little adjustment required in driving style from the i3, apart from using my left hand instead of my right to select R or D — and even that wouldn’t apply in a left-hand-drive market. It’s just as easy to drive with one pedal — although it’s more likely than the i3 to require a touch of friction to complete a stop — and it has the same easy urge at any sensible road speed.

Inside it’s more like the CLS’s Euro-technocrat style than the i3’s minimalist-luxe. To be honest, I didn’t take in much of the interior; I got comfortable easily (full electric seats in this SE) and had a decent view out. I did try getting in behind myself, which I could — although if Jaguar made a LWB model, that’s the one I’d choose. Headroom was OK, though — even with a Humph-friendly glass roof. Decent boot too, but again not in Mercedes territory, and a long way off the ground.

But I want one because of how it feels on the road. It’s beautifully smooth and poised, not the least bit jiggly but with no sign of the excessive softness that the CLS occasionally shows from its ‘Comfort’ springs. We did a 20-mile circuit of Hampshire roads I know well from 25 years ago, which threw up a couple of overtaking opportunities. Neither would have worried either of my cars but the Jaguar snaffled both with panache and lots of road to spare. Apparently it has a sort of interior whoosh generator for drivers who might miss the sound of eight cylinders, all mine, but someone before us had turned it off and it sounded just fine to me. Why make noise when you don’t need to?

I’ve said here many times that I don’t like the SUV ‘form factor’ (sorry) because tall cars tend to be either wallowy or jiggly. This one isn’t as tall as either of Jaguar’s fossil SUVs (there was an I in the showroom, between an E and an F) but it’s still taller than the i3 but you simply wouldn’t know on the road. Nor would you know that it’s 300kg heavier than the already hefty CLS; it never felt ponderous or unwieldy.

I know I need to beware of my own tendency to be bowled over by the latest, shiniest thing I see, but this is a hugely impressive piece of kit. If there were to be a ‘Grande’ version, maybe 200mm longer, shared equally between rear seat and boot, I’d already be asking where to sign.

But you don’t imagine that isn’t going to happen, do you? Shell is already committed to it, and the mainstream makers all have full EVs in the, erm, pipeline. None of this is accident or whim.

In any case, I reckon the I-P is already good enough for 80% of users. There’ll be the odd outlier like Humph, who routinely does 400-mile days, but most of us who drive that far at all do so a couple of times a year and could compensate with a bit of route planning. Even a 7kW charger like ours at home adds about 40 miles of range per hour of charging; 50kW DC charging will fill even the 90 kWh I-P battery in 100 minutes or so, and fill the i3 in the time it takes to eat lunch; about 120 range miles per hour for the I-P and more like 180 for the i3.

What this means is that even our 400 miles from Ravensburg to Liège last month would have required only one stop in an I-Pace. (In the CLS we stopped three times, mainly for biological reasons and once for diesel.) This year, that would have required a little planning; next summer, I reckon we’d just turn up and plug in.

And that’s just the annual summer road trip. We never drive that far in a day in the UK; 270 miles to the in-laws in Durham is about the limit. Once the Yorkshire Sculpture Park installs DC chargers, that’s our lunch stop covered.

The rest of the time, we just drive. The reason for having the CLS as well as the i3 is not, for the most part, range but space; we use it when we need to take more people and/or stuff than will fit in the little car.

I really can’t see plug-in hybrids — or the other kind that Toyota absurdly calls ‘self-charging hybrids’ — enduring beyond the next couple of years. There may be a few more range-extender types like our i3 — in some ways that principle would work better in a larger car — but the complexity and weight of multi-way gearboxes and plural clutches isn’t a serious way forward.