Quiet, isn’t it? you join me inside the Jaguar I-Pace which is what? It's an electric
vehicle, a full battery electric vehicle no range extender no internal
combustion of any kind it is the second premium battery electric vehicle I
suppose after ‘an Tesla,’ it is the second, Jaguar is the second manufacturer to
get in on doing it. It’s funny isn't it if you said to me 10/15 years ago
who are going to be the two manufacturers in the world who are the
first to bring premium battery electric vehicles to market. I don't think you'd
have necessarily said somebody I've never heard of plus Jaguar but this kind
of makes sense you know new technology arrives and it is usually expensive and
then it filters down to the rest of the range, with battery electric vehicles why
did we ever think it's a good idea to go from the bottom up so the Renault Zoe and
the Nissan Leaf and then push onwards. Surely it makes sense where people have
got a bit of money to spend, to encourage those early adopters who have got
somewhere to charge a car at home, an expendable income and the money to
spend on a car that has a really viable range. The range of this car is around
300 miles that's a pretty decent usable range, isn’t it? Now there are obviously
the caveats about where you’re going to charge it, how long it takes to charge.
100 kilowatt charger, you know, you get an 80 percent charge in under an hour
and so on and so forth. So there's all those issues that if an
electric car does not suit your lifestyle, look away now.
If it does however, or if you're just interested, welcome to
I guess the future of a kind because one day everything will be EV powered, won’t it?
I mean, you know, exceptions aside. And what’s that like? well from a certain point of
view an EV is a fairly straightforward thing, a load of batteries,
a motor or two, put it in a car. And from that point of view it's actually a very
simple proposition, there is a bit more to it than that.
Beneath the I-paces aluminium body structure, the platform follows a fairly
typical skateboardy template that electric cars use. The battery pack, here
about 430 lithium-ion cells totaling 90 kilowatt hours, sits on the floor between
the axles and each axle has its own permanent magnet electric motor with an
inverter attached to it. This means the I-Pace is four-wheel-drive and it's this,
Jaguar says, which allows the axles to be out at each corner. If it was two-wheel
drive the rear wheels would have to be pushed further forward and yes it's all
waterproof so the I-Pace can wade through 500 millimetres of water. At the front
suspension is by double wishbones and at the back there is an integral link. You
can have coil springs on passive dampers, the same with active dampers or as we've
tested, on air springs which allow an adjustable ride height. And all of that
means what from an I-Pace perspective? Well it's a car that is
about the size of an XF but with even more space inside, it’s quite wide because
it's an aluminium structure but not obnoxiously so. It's got a light airy
interior but what's quite cool about it is that it does still feel like a
premium Jaguar product, it's well finished inside, it's more nicely
finished inside than probably any Tesla but I think a Model 3
particular. Some people go ‘Oh my goodness a new electric car it's gonna
kill Tesla, oh my goodness, you know, it's gonna be a problem for another
car manufacturer. I don't believe that's true. The overall market for EV’s
is growing at such a rate and it is so small at the moment that there is space
in there for everybody. Remember when MG launched the MGF, for
overseas readers it's a car from MG rover group that had its engine in the
middle, at that point Mazda MX-5 sales did not fall off a cliff, they went up
because it gathered more interest to that market and I could see the more EV’s
that go on sale, the more EV’s from everywhere that will be sold. But anyway
enough all that, what is this one like? Well it's fast, I can tell you that much
and it's quite heavy. In terms of power delivery, in terms of what it's like to
drive, are we at risk of creating things that are all in some ways a little bit
similar. An electric motor, you talk about an inefficient electric motor and a
really efficient one, this one's got a really efficient one, you're looking at a
difference between sort of 90 and 95 percent efficiency, you're talking very
small differences. There’s only three people in the world really who are capable of
making the batteries to a decent extent, one Japanese, two South Korean.
These batteries are from LG, two electric motors gives a really stable steady
driving characteristic even though actually the front one usually does the
regeneration and the back one usually does the driving. When you ask more of
this chassis, it is so fast, honestly, it's ridiculous.
400 horsepower but well over 550lb ft of torque. It’s just, it's just absurd,
it's really cool to drive but EV’s do have a bit of a driving characteristic
to them. Jaguar says this car drives like a Jaguar, well look it feels like no
Jaguar I've ever driven, it's just absurd and because their noise levels
are really low, there is there is a fake noise in this actually and you can turn
it up or down. If I put this car into dynamic mode, that ups the noise, in
quiet mode, sorry I'm rambling but there's quite a lot to get through and
it's all, it's not like reviewing a normal car because there is so many
different things to tell you, for example It uses anti noise so that in comfort mode
everything's really quiet, when you put it into dynamic not only does it cancel
the anti noise, it adds an artificial noise.
Sound good? I quite like it, I might turn it down if I owned one of these and
used it every day to go to the station and back, I might sort get a bit tired of the
warp drive effect but it's quite cool and you could do that kind of thing with
an EV. What are the problems with an EV?
Well one, well you know, does it fit your life or not? You decide, you worry about that,
two, and this is a thing, and I wonder whether this will be an ongoing thing, although
the centre of gravity is very low and although the weight distribution is
terrifically 50/50 and although you can put power exactly where you want when you want,
which is brilliant. The ride of these cars is never that great, this is
probably as good as it as good as it gets for an EV but the ride quality
on a saloon is still better, the Jaguar saloon in particular is better.
It weighs from 2200 kg’s, so I've no idea what this one comes in at, maybe
it's 2.3 tonnes, maybe that's part of the problem, you know, you're trying to get
sporty characteristics and there is a low center of gravity so role is fairly
well contained, but trying to get sporty-ish
characteristics into a car which is heavy,
there is no question but, they’ve tried to make it do what some Jaguar’s do, so when
you turn and you trail the brakes, it feels like it's helping it rotate into the
corner and certainly in terms of powering through a corner there, it's so
capable, I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of
the fastest point-to-point cars around. If that's what you wanted, not sure that's what I want.
Anyway, it steers quite nicely, it's comfortable enough. There are
elements to the steering of Jaguar-ness about it, it doesn't drive like a
traditional Jaguar, there is a big raft of infotainment, it's a new system for Jaguar, it’s
a bit like the Range Rover Velar actually, the stuff at the bottom
does the heating and ventilation and then you get the navigation and so on at the
top where you have to move your eyes from the road a bit less. In some ways I
like that I like the fact that there are clear dials for some things so that you
don't have to go into a touchscreen for everything. The touchscreen itself is not
as good as the one in a Tesla, it is not as good as the infotainment system you
get in a BMW or an Audi and if you don't mind me getting away from the whole road
testing thing for a moment, so it can do things off-road that you can't do in an
internally combusted vehicle, so it has the Land Rover-like system which is
like an off-road cruise control where it guides your speed up or downhill at any,
you know, you preset it on the wheel and it just tries to
maintain that speed off road, this does that brilliantly because it doesn't have
to worry about always maintaining drive to everywhere and preventing the engine
from stalling or worrying about softening the talk vectoring and stuff,
it just decides exactly what power it wants to put to what wheel, whenever it
wants to, however it wants to. That’s fabulous, that's really clever and
presumably it can even mimic the power delivery of other things, so Dakar
motorbikes, the big singles, apparently they, you know, on sand sometimes they
won’t get stuck and part of that is because of the pulsing of the engine
and you wouldn't get that on a four-cylinder motorbike because it would
be providing torque too much all the time and might bury itself
in rather than helping to did itself out, I don’t quite understand! Anyway you can do that
with an electric motor if you wanted to and you couldn't do that with a diesel
engine and an 8-speed automatic gearbox and all of the locking diffs in the
world, so from a perspective of off-roading,
from a future Land Rover perspective, I think it's really cool, really interesting, you
could end up with a car that goes further than any other as a result of
the fact that it's electric powered, which is cool. In summary then is some brilliant
tech, it's really compelling, it's really, really impressive and the potential for
it only just goes on. If it doesn't fit your life, you're not gonna have one, if
it does I would be in very little doubt when I say this, I think this is the best
electric car on sale today!