Jaguar XF Features New Brand Look and Steel Insides
XF Grabs What Diesel Car of the Year Award
The new Jaguar XF represents a new design direction for Ford’s luxury brand. A new front grille design gives the vehicle a decidedly different look than its predecessors. A new character line runs the length of the vehicle body side, pegged a new brand feature. And it’s loaded with all the latest in high-tech features, including a shiny knob in the center stack for changing gears instead of the usual shifter.
Said Geoff Polites, CEO for Jaguar-Land Rover at the launch, “The new XF is what I firmly believe is the best looking Jaguar, ever.” Reviews around the industry seem to agree. And just last week (16 April), Just last week, What Diesel awarded the Jaguar XF “2008 Car of the Year, Best Executive Car.”
The car maker is calling it, “The beginning of a new era for Jaguar.”
Peel back the skin, and it’s the stuff that makes us steel industry people proud. Rather than try and tell you what they said, you can read it for yourself in their own press release, which is attached to this article. But here’s an excerpt about the steel vehicle body:
“Engineering excellence and class-leading structural rigidity are at the heart of the new XF's construction. The advanced body structure, which comprises high-tech materials and new-generation design techniques, maximises strength and minimises weight to give the XF superb performance, refinement and efficiency across its range of V6 and V8 engines. These engines include the quietest diesel engine in its class and a supercharged V8 that delivers outstanding levels of performance.
“The XF adopts the latest generation steels, especially in the upper body – including high carbon steels, dual-phase, hot-formed boron steels, and bake-hardened steels to form a vertical safety ‘ring’ around the occupant cell.
“As well as combining strength with lightness, these steels improve corrosion resistance, by making best use of zinc and improving e-coat paint flow – and new thinking means that in spite of their strength, the XF’s A and B-pillars are impressively slim, to the benefit of both visibility and accessibility. Similarly, the lower sills are the first component on any Jaguar to use incredibly strong, dual-phase DP600 steel.”
An exciting feature of the XF’s transmission control is the all-new JaguarDrive SelectorTM – an industry-first rotary shift interface that combines precise, intuitive control with space-saving packaging, to allow maximisation of interior storage options. Click the video to see the XF start-up demo.
That’s the kind of story we like to hear, especially since the XF is the first steel-intensive sedan to come out of Jaguar in a while. Jaguar designers seem to be discovering that you don’t have to go aluminium to go light.
The Jaguar design team also employed holistic design to optimise the vehicle from front to boot. Jaguar used cutting-edge technologies with massive computing power and sophisticated modelling programmes to create components and even whole vehicles in the virtual world, before building physical parts and perfecting the systems and processes to manufacture the car.
Phil Hodgkinson, Jaguar Programmes Director, explains: “The engineering disciplines behind the XF are as ground-breaking as its new design language. New development processes and computer tools allowed us to work through the programme at a quicker pace than anything previously; new technologies and materials combine strength with lightness; and Jaguar craftsmanship, too, has explored new, exciting contemporary avenues.”
The XF represents the first time that VP and VS tools have been used by Jaguar throughout a complete vehicle programme - from vehicle development, to production feasibility studies, to build planning. Consequently, they were able to cut time of the development cycle while improving craftsmanship, efficiency, and even long-term serviceability.
