2015 Jaguar XE review: Finally, a British car that competes with its German rivals

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ars.AD.queue.push(["xrailTop", {sz:"300x251", kws:["bottom"], collapse: true}]);Khaki and olive green camouflage paint still sticks to the brick exterior of the South Works at Jaguar Land Rover’s Solihull, West Midlands car plant. It’s a fading reminder that this facility started out as a Second World War shadow factory building Bristol Hercules 14-cylinder, 39-litre sleeve-valve radial engines for the RAF’s Bristol Beaufighters and Handley Page Hastings heavy bombers. Rover car production took over at Solihull in 1946, and the Land Rover was built there from 1948. Though Jaguar and Land Rover have been married together in the Tata-owned vehicle group since 2008, the 308-acre (124-hectare) Solihull site has remained a Land Rover stronghold in recent years, with Jaguars built at the nearby Castle Bromwich factory. But Solihull is the home for two key new Jaguar models, the XE and the F-Pace, which between them represent a £1.5 billion investment in a modular, aluminium-intensive vehicle architecture and new production facilities.

The most obvious expression of that at Solihull is the aluminium bodyshop—the largest of its type in Europe—where 613 robots wielding 299 rivet guns make the bodyshells for both new Jaguars. At full capacity the bodyshop will feed an 81,000m² final assembly line that can complete a car every 78 seconds—not just Jaguars, but also the Range Rover Sport. It’s not unusual for different models to share a single production line—Land Rover even built monocoque Range Rovers and ladder-chassis Discoverys along the same line—but it’s curious seeing such disparate models sharing a build track. Each bodyshell travels the line on one of 230 pantograph platforms which raise or lower to the right height for each assembly operation. Two XEs head down the line for every Range Rover Sport, and when the F-Pace comes on stream early next year and the assembly operation goes from its current two-shift operation to three-shift work, Jaguars will dominate.

At least, that’s the plan. To make it happen, Jaguar needs to sell the new cars in substantial numbers, which in the XE’s case means around 100,000 a year. To do that, against rivals like BMW’s 3 Series, Audi’s new A4, and Mercedes-Benz’s C Class, the XE has to be spectacularly accomplished.