Long life ahead for Jaguar XF and XK

Jaguar may be on the verge of launching an all-new small car model family and expanding the range of F-TYPE sporties on offer, but don’t expect replacements for the XF executive sedan and XK gran turismo 2+2 any time soon.

At last week’s international launch of the high-performance XFR-S and XJR in Seattle (USA), the iconic British brand’s Product Marketing and Planning Director, Steven De Ploey, delivered strong hints that both of the key models would soldier on with perhaps only minor updates.

De Ploey pointed to the arrival of the XF Sportbrake wagon (pictured), and the long model cycles of large GTs such as XK and competitors such as Mercedes’ SL range, as evidence of the likely extended timing of the replacements for the models.

“I think what we’ve been able to do with F-Type, is clearly give back to some extent, to XK, the role it always was intended to be attributed, which is more of a GT... Not the kind of focused two-seater sports car without compromise...” De Ploey explained.

“The spearhead of our technology and our performance drive will be focused on F-TYPE first and foremost. Of course, XK will benefit in the slipstream of anything that we’re doing with F-TYPE... We haven’t decided anything with regard to replacement or timing of XK, but clearly, [the] GT segment has a very long life-cycle with any of our competitors. Quite often it actually went over 10 years in terms of the life of the car.

“From that point of view, we have some flexibility, obviously, in terms of when we time that car. But the priority is on F-Type and managing the life cycle, and the technology innovation of that car,” he stated.

According to De Ploey, F-TYPE’s arrival has already boosted sales of the older 2+2 – more justification to delay the replacement for a company that must watch its development dollars.

“Now we can really say: ‘You’re a pure sports car driver, here’s your F-TYPE. You’re more of a GT type of customer, you need more of the space, the packaging, the comfort – here’s your [XK] model offer”.

“And we’ve seen on the back of the introduction of F-TYPE that sales of XK actually increased by about 25-30 per cent,” he said.

“We’ve got a lot of people that are attracted to this [F-TYPE]... A lot of people that we never saw before in a Jaguar showroom because of the much younger, progressive sports car... They didn’t know that an XK even existed.”

The next generation XF is a more pressing need for Jaguar, but does the arrival of the Sportbrake and the substantial investment it entailed, mean there’ll be a wait before the all-new model arrives?

“The answer is yes. The strategy is to, say, nurture the existing assets as much as possible,” De Ploey explained.

“If you look just in the US, for example, we were offering the XF only with a 5.0-litre V8, so that is like a tiny portion of the market. So what we’ve done is we’ve introduced a new 3.0-litre Supercharged, which obviously made it much more efficient with similar performance.

“We’ve [also] introduced a 2.0-litre, which has grown massively the XF’s market appeal – particularly in the Chinese market... Then we’ve introduced the Sportbrake, which is particularly relevant for UK, Europe, but also your own [Australian] market...

“We’ve grown close to a 100 per cent in the States, and over 100 per cent in volume in China – that’s all been based simply on expanding the scope and the breadth of the existing line-up.  And obviously we wouldn’t do that type of significant investment on the powertrain and drivetrain side if we didn’t still have some life in the car.”

So when it comes, will the new XF follow XJ and its Range Rover cousins into the realm of a full aluminium monocoque?

De Ploey says maybe.

“In that [executive sedan] segment, aluminium has strong benefits, and also the price points in that segment allow you to have the on-cost which can be offset in terms of [end user] efficiency,” De Ploey explained.

“A customer, and particularly fleet customers, can calculate the efficiency in the gain that you’ve got. You can almost charge for the on-cost of the aluminium because customers know that they will actually get it back,” he said.

This writer is on Twitter @petrolhedonist

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