Sometimes, your heart simply wins out. The best all-around luxury car on the market is the Audi A8L, but it's a machine that you admire rather than love. Instead, I'd choose the long wheelbase Jaguar XJ8 with the supercharged V-8 engine option. The Audi is an almost flawless package: a beautiful interior, a super powertrain, dramatic looks, and sensational ground-covering ability. The problem with the Audi is that it connects only when you're covering ground at suicidal speed, right on the ragged edge. At low speeds, it feels inert. As do all Audis, in fact.
In many ways, the Jag is a far more flawed proposition. (Although we will discount the fact that the all-aluminum Audi weighs fully 400 pounds more than the alloy Jag.) The interior looks like a generic Britcar-wood and leather and wool-but without the touches that make British cars so special. Sure, the gloss black surround for the navigation screen is cool, and the rubber/chrome wheels for the air vents, the picnic tables in the back of the front seats, and the chrome trim around the power window lifts are nice, but much of the plastic trim is sub-par and the leather looks like plastic.
Yet in use, you forgive the Jag these faults, because it has some of the most intuitive controls on a modern luxury car.... Read full article