Jaguar XF Sportbrake 3.0d V6 Portfolio
What is it?
The XF Sportbrake – Jaguar’s well-proportioned estate variant of its popular XF executive saloon – was first revealed to welcoming applause in March 2012, with sales commencing in October of that year.
All XF saloon and estate variants are built at Jaguar’s Castle Bromwich state-of-the-art facility outside Birmingham.
While the Sportbrake range is available with all the (diesel only) engines from the saloon line-up (read the 2.2-litre review here), this review will focus on the 3.0 V6 turbo diesel. Suffice to say, both you and your accountant may be pleasantly surprised.
On the road, the Sportbrake is brilliant to drive, thanks to its excellent handling, supple motorway ride and the seamless and truly superb 8-speed ZF automatic ‘box sending all available torque (600Nm) to the rear wheels. The burbling 3.0-litre V6 diesel is very strong and more suited to the car’s sporty character, too.
For business executives with families, the five-door XF Sportbrake remains a more practical and versatile choice than the saloon, offering greater load lugging capacity.
Thanks to the range-wide torque available from the superb 3.0-litre diesel V6 engine, it has a towing capacity of 1850kg which is ample for family-sized caravans and slightly under its own kerb weight of 1890kg.
With row two seats up and load cover in place, the rear of the Sportbrake has a capacity of 550 litres.
Retracting the load cover and lowering the seats reveals a whopping 1675 litres of space, surpassing that of the Mercedes-Benz CLS Shooting Brake. The load area is fitted with twin 197cm multi-function rails, to secure smaller items when you’re on the move.
The extended roofline increases rear headroom by nearly two inches and when you don’t need all of the available space, the rear bench is split 60:40 via a remote-controlled ‘one-touch’ folding function for those more awkward loads. As you might expect from latter-day Jaguar, it’s all very well thought out.
The 3.0-litre Sportbrake Portfolio is generously well-equipped with all executive essentials in place and is competitively priced against rivals. Resale values are reasonable, making worthy arguments as company cars, either owned or leased.
