Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £69,505 to £78,400
Performance to match the looks, exquisite ride and refinement.
Boot's too small, cabin's too ordinary.
A brilliant combination of performance, comfort and flair; now with an engine that delivers on the XK's looks.
The XKR has a full 21st century set of stability and traction control programs. They feel like they're there to stop it all going horribly wrong if you make a mistake, rather than intervening prematurely and stopping you having fun. The brakes have also been uprated to match the increase in performance.
If you do come a cropper, the XKR has an 'intelligent' driver's airbag that figures out whether the driver is wearing a seatbelt and how severe the crash is, and deploys the bag accordingly. There are also two combined front head and thorax airbags to protect occupants in a big impact. The headrests are designed to move forward to give better protection against whiplash. In the back, the two child-sized seats benefit from Isofix child seat fittings.
Jaguar is claiming a world first with its 'pyrotechnic pedestrian deployable bonnet', designed to keep the low-profile look so important to sporting Jaguars while still conforming to forthcoming legislation that insists there must be space between the bonnet and the hard points of the engine. In normal running, the bonnet sits snugly on top of the V8. But if the XKR's sensors reckon there's about to be an impact, small explosions raise the bonnet a few inches, thus creating a space between bonnet and engine, increasing the chances of a pedestrian's head avoiding terminal damage.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Jaguar XKR
wrote on 24 03 2007