Well I have clocked up around 115 miles of varied driving today, including motorways, A roads and lots of twisting winding B roads and a bit of stop start around town stuff. I've been reading 22mpg average on that. I suppose it might be possible to get 30mpg if I stayed cruising on a motorway for long enough. I got this economy with a few foot to the floor blasts and a bit of J-gate manual use
...but mostly normal driving.
The average on trip B has fallen now I've got the car actually
The economy of the 3.5 (why do they call it a 3.5, it's actually 3,555cc, so if you round it it's 3.6) is actually supposed to be within 1mpg on average of the 4.2. There really isn't an advantage to the 3.5, it was just a case of that's what this car has and I couldn't find a 4.2 with the rest of the spec I wanted, well I couldn't find a 4.2 Sport basically, not one I wanted to buy anyway.
I'm still surprised by the performance of this car, it's no hot-rod off the line, but once it's moving it goes quite well indeed (probably because I was expecting it to feel a bit steady tbh), put your foot down from 30mph and it'll hit 70mph faster than either of my sixes would I'm sure, the real differences comes in beyond that point though, keep your foot down and it carries on accelerating at the same rate, at 100mph I took my foot off the accelerator and just cruised back down to 75, since I want to keep my license. The BMW and the ST220 wouldn't pull past 70mph that effortlessly, they'd easily do that, no problems at all, but not with such an effortless breeze of acceleration as the big Jag, both felt like they were working much harder. What a lovely car is all I can say so far, I'm enjoying it a lot, I'm probably driving more slowly though, on th whole, as a result of the car wanting to cruise more than set my hair on fire.
Also, being a post 2003 Sport, it has the CATS suspension fitted, so it handles rather better than you might think when you grab it by the scruff of the neck, put the gear box into manual mode and pretend it's a 330CI or something
...ok so at times today I was thinking ohhh I shouldn't be going this fast into this corner, this isn't going to work, thinking I'm doing 20mph less than I actually am, it's hugely deceptive, I'm finding myself going faster than I think a lot of the time, I'll get used to that though, well I already am now I've clocked up a few miles in it, I think.
Jez; your merc is the 4.3 right? ...well I had a look at the figurs for that car, performance is pretty much identical to the 3.5 Jag actually, due to the fairly considerable extra weight the S class is carrying, the Jag 4.2 is quite a bit quicker on paper than the 4.3 Merc.
The one thing above all that strikes me about the Jag, is how comfortable it is, so smooth and cosseting, and I thought my 330CI with it's rock hard run-flats and M-tech sports suspension was quite comfortable when I first had it, well not really, not even close. I suppose it was comapred to my prior small hatches though.
