Headlines aren’t a priority for Jaguar’s electric crossover.
When British marque Jaguar pulled the wraps off of the new I-Pace electric crossover, immediately parallels were bring drawn between it and the Tesla Model X, the car that’s broadly considered to have made electric crossovers a mainstream thing. In fact, Jaguar released a video pitting it against the Model X, a P100D at that, and the electric cat absolutely creamed it in a 0-60mph-0 test.
With so much power on tap, and Jaguar’s renowned driving characteristics, it wasn’t long before people started asking if there might be a Special Vehicles version of it. A hotter SVR perhaps, that would leave a Tesla Model X and upcoming competitors like the Audi E-tron left in smoke. And it seems that the bosses at Jaguar haven’t stopped themselves from looking into it, though they’ve clarified that if they do go down the performance route, it won’t be just about dragstrip bragging rights.
“We have asked ourselves how you would ‘SVR’ an electric car. Yes, we can make it do [0-100km/h] in 1.8-seconds. It’s a good headline, but once you’ve done it once or twice, and you’ve lost your eyes in the back of their sockets, you might not want to do it again.” — Hanno Kirner, Executive Director (Corporate, Strategy) Jaguar-Land Rover
Kirner explained further to UK publication Autocar that the I-Pace already benefits from a 50/50 weight distribution, and so the dynamic setup in standard form indicates what could be possible with a little fettling. He went on to say that “technical enhancements” from present-day SVR cars could be applied similarly to the I-Pace, but that an electric powertrain would “need to be treated with respect.”
An I-Pace SVR would be a great tie-in to Jaguar’s one-make I-Pace eTrophy racing series, which is slated for its inaugural debut later this year. An SVR performance variant could later be developed as an SVX with greater off-road capability, or indeed an SVA with luxury on its mind. Kirner said that “there is more than one route we could take,” suggesting that the company would stop at nothing to maximise the I-Pace’s potential.
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