Jag’s engineers talk about “50-metre feel”. It’s a refreshing admission that five years’ effort and £1bn investment can be undone in a heartbeat if the basics aren’t right.

Top Gear’s version is called the “5am start”. To be brutally honest, I’m not a big fan, but you know the score: there are cars you’d happily set the alarm for, usually the ones that dribble with horsepower and make a sound like Brian Blessed gargling Madras-infused mouthwash.

The Jaguar XE is not one of those. It’s much more important than that. So important that thousands of jobs have been created in the Midlands to build it, and that its success or otherwise will have a genuinely seismic impact on the brand’s bottom line. Whiskery members of the automotive media have written that sentence a lot down the years. This time it’s For Real.

Pictures: Richard Pardon

This feature originally appeared in the February 2015 issue of Top Gear Magazine