Jeep Grand Cherokee VS Jaguar E-Pace

We’re all time-poor, right? So, why should I take up your time and rattle on about the 4xe for a thousand words when I can get the essence of it across to you, the reader, in a few sentences? Call me, Mr Thoughtful.

This is generally a big, quiet and refined, easy-steering large SUV, but it feels bulky at times and tends to be quite fussy on irregular surfaces, exhibiting a jittery ride on even brief sections of light corrugations on dirt tracks.

The 4xe’s PHEV set-up is smooth and highly responsive on-road and you can switch between the aforementioned drive modes to suit the circumstance.

Driving range on electric only is listed as 52km. I only recorded a total distance of just under 50km, and it’s a very quiet and smooth drive while relying on electric power.

It regenerates power rather quickly down big hills and via braking, but we’d exhausted all electric charge by the time we’d reached our 4WD test track.

As expected, this Grand Cherokee tackled every off-road challenge without any strife. 

The air suspension, set to full off-road height, is a bonus.

Our 4WD test track consists of difficult set-pieces, including one small steep rocky hill that I’ve seen heavily modified vehicles struggle to conquer and, to the Jeep’s credit, it climbed the incline, no sweat.

The 4xe’s efforts were only ever hampered by its 'all-season' Continental CrossContact tyres (275/45R21) which are much better suited to blacktop driving and the fact the 4xe costs upwards of $129,950 and I didn’t want to risk any damage to it.

The 4xe has a listed wading depth of 610mm but our test track was dry so I never had the chance to do any water crossings. 

The Grand Cherokee has a solid enough rep as a towing vehicle but, take note, the 4xe is rated to tow 2722kg.

The good news is there’s plenty of genuine Jaguar in the way the car feels to drive, up to a point.

Through long sweeping bends of the medium to high-speed variety, it is great, fluid fun, with minimal body roll, and properly involving, muscular steering.

You can actually feel you’re in a car that’s related to the hugely enjoyable and tough-feeling F-Type. Turn-in is crisp and involving and the front-end set-up feels as sporty as Jaguar people enthusiastically suggest it will be.

And then you arrive, quite quickly, at a 35km/h-marked corner, throw it in and remember that you’re not sitting with your bum anywhere near the ground, and you are piloting a top-heavy machine that weighs nearly two tonnes.

At this point you will get a mild scare, but even then the Jaguar doesn't really misbehave, it simply puts you back in your box and reminds you that a sports car, this is not.

The E-Pace really is a surprisingly heavy vehicle, though, and while that weight can feel like solidity and premium quality while you’re cruising along, it does dull the driving experience on a twisty road.

With diesel-engined cars weighing “from” 1936kg and petrol-engined versions just slightly less, the E-Pace not only weighs in significantly heavier than competitors like Audi’s Q3 or BMW’s X2, it’s actually heavier than its big brother, the F-Pace, despite being a lot smaller (4731 mm vs 4411mm overall length).

The reason is that, while the F-Pace is made of expensive aluminium, the smaller Jag is built on a more steel-heavy platform, a revised version of the architecture Range Rover’s Evoque sits on.

Jaguar says the E-Pace platform is all-new from the firewall forward, so it can have more Jag-like handling, but the decision to share an older design rather than giving it new, lightweight underpinnings of its own is yet another case of saving on cost to get the price tag down.

As sporty as the performance of the up-spec engines is, it’s interesting to wonder just how much better this car might be if it was shaved of 200kg or even 400kg, of weight.

The fact is the E-Pace is not really about being sporty, it’s about stretching the Jag brand as far as possible. If it feels and looks like a Jaguar, and a lot more people can afford one, then genuine sportiness really won’t matter.

For all that, Jag has genuinely managed to engineer in enough Jaguar DNA, particularly in the steering department, to please customers.

On the downside, the ride is unfortunately jiggly and jarring on our rough and broken Aussie roads, particularly if you spec the larger and more attractive 19-, 20- or 21-inch wheels rather than the more sensible standard 17s. And there is quite a bit of tyre roar on coarse-chip surfaces.

The top-spec diesel is meaty and pleasant to use and manages to sound enthusiastic under strain, only becoming slightly clattery at low throttle openings in traffic.

The only time you really notice it’s an oil-burner, however, is when the start-stop system kicks the engine back into life with a cough and a splutter.

Slip down the diesel engine range, however, and the weight-versus-performance equation becomes more noticeable. The base diesel is a bit of a slug, with a 0-100km/h time on the wrong side of 10 seconds, and seems to pause and take a deep breath each time you apply the throttle, or at the base of a hill. Those using the E-Pace for the school run probably won’t mind.

The top-spec petrol engine is, not surprisingly, the pick of the bunch; willing to rev and genuinely quite remarkable when you consider that it is merely a four-cylinder 2.0-litre unit that’s being asked to haul around more than two tonnes of machine and human.

It’s fair to say that, being the hardest working four-cylinders in show business, they sound like they’re straining at high revs rather than having a good time.

It should also be noted that there is absolutely none of the traditional Jaguar growling or howling to be found in the E-Pace.