What's the news?
Jaguar will add a four-wheel drive option to its XF and XJ saloons for the 2013 model year. All-wheel drive will be offered solely with a supercharged petrol engine to begin with, and not in right-hand drive markets. Sales are targeted at North America, Russia, China and continental Europe.
Exterior
The only visual identifier for the four-wheel drive XF and XJ will be a "3.0 AWD" badge on their boot lids.
Interior
Same story inside, though drivers will have the option of a Winter mode to select via the Jaguar Drive Control buttons. This pushes more of the engine's output to the front wheels than usual.
Mechanicals
Power comes from Jaguar's new supercharged 3.0-litre V6 petrol engine. It produces 340hp at 6,500rpm and up to 450Nm of torque between 3,500- and 5,000rpm. It's allied with ZF's acclaimed eight-speed automatic transmission, enabling stop-start functionality.
The casing of the gearbox is modified to accommodate a transfer case with an active coupling that directs torque via an additional propshaft to the front differential. Most of the engine's output is sent to the rear wheels in normal operation (other than when accelerating from rest) and when slip is detected or predicted (Jaguar uses a 'feed forward' strategy to attempt to predict the onset of the loss of grip) up to 50 per cent of the torque is diverted to the front axle. The front sub-frame, suspension and exhaust have all been redesigned, while engine and Adaptive Dynamics software have been recalibrated.
Top speed of both XF and XJ AWD remains limited to 250km/h and the addition of the four-wheel drive hardware increased the quoted 0-100km/h time by half a second to 6.4 seconds.
Anything else?
Jaguar reckons that, thanks to the introduction of the AWD cars, it will now compete in 80 per cent of the global luxury market - four times its previous coverage. The United States is expected to account for 75 per cent of all four-wheel drive models, which are produced at Jaguar's Castle Bromwich factory in the UK. As mentioned earlier, there are no plans to offer the XF and XJ AWD for sale in Ireland.