2011 Jaguar XJ L Supercharged
With the modern automobile’s mass generally increasing year by year, it is often said that the mark of a good vehicle is its ability to shrink around the driver — to drive like a smaller, lighter car than its lengthy list of standard equipment and safety features would suggest. Here, on the impossibly tight and windy sections of Malibu, California’s famed Mulholland Drive, the 2011 Jaguar XJ L Supercharged — Jaguar’s newest flagship luxury sedan — does exactly that.
More than 4000 pounds and 206 inches of luxury sedan isn’t exactly in its element hustling the fine, treacherously narrow line between jagged, rocky canyon walls and perilously steep drop-offs, but the Jaguar is sure-footed and well-composed. The winding ribbon of well-traveled gray asphalt seems custom-made for a 7/8ths scale car — a diminutive Lotus Exige, perhaps. Still, the long-wheelbase, aluminum-framed Jaguar XJ is up to the task, turning in with precision and quickness decidedly against the norm for the executive transportation class. But then, Jaguar has never been enamored with the norm.
