I've had my new-to-me 2017 XE 35t for exactly one month now after having a pretty rough start. I went from the best dealership I've ever dealt with in my previous car to a Service (using that word loosely) Department at the Jaguar dealership that was just plain strange.

Anyways, here's my top/middle/bottom thoughts:

Where they completely nailed it:

- Ride/Handling: With the 19" wheels the ride/handling balance pretty much blows me away. This car has stellar steering response even with all-seasons yet isn't harsh at all over bumps. Simply amazing.

- Power/economy: Another balance that's great. Driving back about 50km from a friends place with 90% highway gave me 7.4l/100km and I hammered it a couple of times. Even if the computer is optimistic and it was really 8l/100km I consider it great and would have been even better had I managed to keep my right foot off the floor more often (good luck with that!).

- Driving position: Spot-on perfect for me. One of the first things I noticed during my original test drive was the ability to get a perfect driving position with just a few small adjustments.

- Screen location: I like having the screen integrated into the centre stack. For some reason the "iPad glued to the dash" approach so many other manufacturers are using really bugs me.

- Sound system: Absolutely love it. The sound is stellar and it gets really loud with no distortion. I have a reasonably high end sound system at home and this system isn't lacking at all.

Things I thought would bug me but don't:

- Interior storage: I was concerned about the lack of interior storage but turns out there's enough for my purposes. On first look I also wished there was a cover over the little stash pad in the centre stack but the open space turns out to be ok. I'd still prefer if it were covered and I did have to put a little storage cup in the cup holder for spare change.

- Visibility out the back: I thought the large C pillars in combination with the headrests would seriously effect visibility but I'm not finding any problems here. I usually put the headrests down but even with them up the visibility isn't as bad as i would have expected.

- Interior materials: Originally I was a little disappointed with some of the harder plastics but after living with the interior for a month I don't even notice them.

Things I would like to see improved:

- Remote start on the key fob: I really do miss this feature, specially because I park the car in an underground garage where the app won't work. Even outside I'd prefer to just hit a button or two to remote start it.

- Off-idle response: Compared to the larger 3.6 NA in my previous car I find response right off idle to be a little sluggish. But the power really comes on over 3000rpm and even at 2000rpm I can feel some torque coming on. The tranny is also super slow to downshift if you need quick power during normal driving.

- Infotainment: The lag adjusting the volume using the steering wheel still really bugs me. Plus I wish I could just load tunes to the SSD (or a USB stick) and create playlists on the go.

- Speaking of the infotainment system, I have run into gremlins (fleas?) at times. Once the media player shut down and I could only listen to the radio. Another time when using my phone over bluetooth I could hear the other person but they couldn't hear me. I ended up having to use my handset on hands free.

- Passive locking: My last car automatically locked after I closed the door if the key fob wasn't inside. This will take more getting used to and even after a month I have the horrible habit of leaving the car unlocked. It's good that the alarm self-arms but I'd much prefer to have the car locked up tight.

- Fuel filler door lock: The manual says it locks but mine doesn't. I can't see a car at this price point not having a lock on the fuel door so it's likely something a dealer can fix.

- Piano black trim: Looks great when it's clean but 10 minutes later dust and fingerprints show up too much my for my liking. Piano black seems pretty popular these days. Dunno why.

- Hard buttons: I'd like to see a few more hard buttons to control things like the seat heating and cooling. The space between the start button and volume control would be a good place for a few buttons.

One thing that drives me INSANE is the auto stop-start that defaults to ON. I do use that feature fairly often but if I forget to turn it off when I first start the car it pretty much guarantees a curse the first time I stop (which is usually on the way out of my underground parking lot when I'm waiting for the exit door to open). At the very least wait until the motor has warmed up before shutting it down.

Overall, I'd have to say nicely done Jaguar and I'm very happy with this car.

 

Try using Pledge on the piano trim. Using the SSD is just awful. Jaguar should've done a removable drive with software that owners can add music to the drive on their computer and put back into the car. The also need HVAC to have enough smarts to know when you turn the seats on on the summer it should default to cooling, not heating..

 

Nice tip on the Pledge I'll give that a shot. I gave up on the SSD and put my music on a USB stick. Still have to create play lists in advance but it works and you can still use voice control to find a song. Kinda funny that I can control almost everything with voice EXCEPT navigation. Gotta lay off the pints when they're thinking this stuff through!!

Agreed defaulting to heating the seats in the summer is another weird one. I created a "Favourite Seat Setting" on the home screen to go straight to cooling and that works.

 

We can do that? Not sure if '17 model has that feature? Can anyone confirm?

 

If it's freezing out and cold in the car, the seats should just come on automatically. Are you listening Jaguar?

 

Thanks for the post, Fretwire.


My seats just revert to "off" when I turn off the ign., but I'd like to know how to make the cooling come on automatically when the A/C runs.


Thanks


Keith

 

I think a customized home screen is a feature of ICT Pro with the latest software update, haven't tried that yet. The jukebox/SSD ability to record CDs appears to be a very poor implementation - I've almost given up on it, and ordered a stubby USB drive for my music collection.

 

Being new to this car and having bought it used for the audition I'm not sure on the terminology. It's a 2017 35t R-Sport and I think I have the InControl Touch Pro system in my car. It's the one with no hard buttons on the sides of the display and with the larger display. Actually I was mostly interested in the top sound system available but I think that only comes with the ICT Pro setup. The car I test drove had the base sound system and I didn't like it (not an audiophile by any means but I like/need good sound).

I'm not in the car right now so this is from memory, but if you set up a new home screen then swipe right from the main home screen to get to the new one, you can hold a finger on the screen and it'll let you add new icons. At the bottom where the shortcuts are there's one that I think is three dots for miscellaneous kinda settings (the other icons I think are navigation, sound system, and phone settings). On that shortcut one of the options is "Favourite Seat Setting". If you hit that it brings up the regular climate seats screen, then you can hit the various buttons to select the setting you want and click "Add" or "Ok" (can't remember the button name) to add it to the new home screen.

Then every time you hit that shortcut it sets the seats to whatever setting you configured. One catch is you don't get any feedback to know the seats turned on so you have to wait a few minutes until you feel the cooling air or go into the climate seats screen to double-check. The other catch is you have to set it from that screen before clicking OK/Add. If you set the seats up in advance then just hit the Add button it doesn't take even though the shortcut shows up.

Hope that helps. I can try for a more accurate step-by-step over the weekend if it'll help and if anybody can tell me how to show the version I'm running I can also check that over the weekend and report back. I'm likely to be running an older version of the software because the dealership was supposed to update it so odds are pretty good they didn't.

 

It's my wife's car, but I drive it sometimes too. I've created shortcuts before on the screen; will give you tip a go tomorrow!

 

Hey Fretwire, are you like 6150SS? I charge extra for that.

But, there are two ways to disable the start- stop feature. Search the forum and there is a thread that will tell you where to pull the plug loose in the trunk that will disable it.

There are also many on this forum that end up tuning their car for better performance, and if you get the tune from velocityap.com just ask and they will include start-stop disable for free as part of the tune, and it will get turned off at the ECU.

And finally, check the speed of your sdram card from the factory on you infotainment system. If it is slow like mine was you can copy contents over to a class 10 card in many cases that will speed up the navi, etc, if you are starting from a slower media. (Kind of like upgrading your notebook computer from a mechanical drive to an ssd, but not as dramatic.)

Stay setup and intonated my friend.

 

I do actually use the start/stop feature so probably wouldn't want to disable it completely. I just *really* wish it defaulted to OFF instead of ON or at the very least remembered the setting between drives. A tune is very possible down the road, specially if I keep this one instead of ordering a shiny new one so that would be an opportunity to see if VelocityAP can fix the way it works.

I should also clarify that this sound system doesn't seem to handle playlists. Even on a USB stick I have to create a directory with all the tunes I want in a mix then change the ID3 of each music file so it's on the same album. Still doesn't work overly well because the media software doesn't seem to handle 'mixed albums' properly but it's better than nothing and at least on a USB stick I can pull it from the car and re-arrange things on my home computer. Gotta agree that this media system implementation isn't very good at all.

I also don't seem to have an SD card in mine. The console has two USB ports, a SIM slot, and I think an HDMI interface. No SD card unless I'm looking in the wrong place.

P.S. I'm more of an old-school nickel/silver guy

 

I believe the ICT Pro is not SD card-based, like the ICT is.