Thinking about picking up a new Jaguar E-Pace? Not a bad choice, considering the awards it’s already been racking up – including Top Gear magazine’s Crossover of the Year. Now Jaguar’s making it even more tempting with the availability of some new features.
The updates to Coventry’s baby crossover include a new engine, suspension, and suite of convenience features.
The new powertrain option is a less potent version of the Ingenium engines already offered. While the E-Pace has been available to date with 250- and 300-metric-horsepower versions of the 2.0-liter turbo four, it can now be ordered with a less powerful 200-ps output that makes it cheaper to buy – in some markets, at least.
In the UK, for example, the new entry-level model starts at just £28,500. The 250-ps version starts at £35,190 and the base diesel at £30,355. So the new cost of admission makes the base E-Pace the cheapest model Jaguar offers, undercutting the £31,505 base price on the XE. The engine offers a 0-60 time of 7.7 seconds, and returns fuel economy of 34.4 miles per gallon.
At the same time, the Leaping Cat marque has rolled out a new active suspension that employs variable triple-tube dampers and external hydraulic valves to improve ride quality, handling response, and body control. The system monitors vehicle movement ever 2 milliseconds and recalculates the required damping force every 10. There’s even an off-road mode, which no doubt owes a great deal to sister-brand Land Rover’s expertise.
There’s also a new Smart Settings feature that detects the driver based on their key fob and smartphone and adjusts the seat, climate control, and infotainment system accordingly. That’s a feature that many vehicles already offer, but Jaguar’s goes further by integrating artificial intelligence to learn the driver’s preferences based not only on how he or she left it last, but incorporate time, location, weather, and behavior patterns to adjust settings more intelligently. So it can, for example, know to pre-heat the steering wheel and seats on a cold morning, or queue up a playlist based on the time of day.
As it has been on an array of vehicles, Jaguar’s also now fitted particulate filters on all the E-Pace’s engine options – not only the diesels.