We found the speed-sensitive power steering to be too light at speed. The XK8 doesn't like to be tossed, pitched, or to abruptly change directions in switchback corners. But you can still love it, as long as you accept it and know what not to expect. What it really loves is to squirt out of traffic and pass other cars.
We've also driven a 2005 XKR convertible. It loves blasting past traffic even more than the XK8. So much so, that you want to do it over and over again. With its sensational whining supercharger, it takes off like a bullet when you mash the gas. You may not even anger other drivers, because the sight of the gorgeous XK flying past them has to be awesome, and a treat.
The suspension is by no means soft during such spirited driving and cornering, as one might expect given the car's luxury slant. Nor is it stiff at other times, although we were once rudely jolted by a modest pothole at 10 miles per hour. But it doesn't match the BMW level of precision, and tends to bob and weave a bit. The track is not so wide for a car this size. You can live with it, but on roads with ripples and undulations you need to keep both hands on the wheel.
The XK convertibles lack the structural rigidity of a Porsche 911 cabriolet, so they don't have that same feeling of being carved from a single block of hard material and you can feel the chassis flex over bumps. Still, the convertible is probably the one to have. If you're going to ride in style, you may as well have the wind in your hair.
The Directional Stability Control is not intrusive, which is nice. We probably got the XK8 in situations where it would have activated, if it had been programmed to do so early, but it didn't.
The engine produces a very healthy 303 pound-feet of torque, which peaks at a relatively high 4100 rpm, meaning it's not always there when you need it. Like any automatic transmission, it kicks down when you floor it, and this one kicks down from third gear a lot, partly to find more torque from higher rpm, and partly because the gap between second and third gears is wide; there may be six gears, but fifth is a solid overdrive and sixth is a super overdrive, so it's not really a close-ratio transmission. You sometimes find yourself at high rpm in second gear or low rpm in third, which is why it kicks down a lot. These would be the gears you most use on winding roads.
Jaguar's J-gate allows the transmission to be manually shifted (although ultimate control is up to the computer sensors); there are slots for gears 2, 3, 4 and 5, with 1st gear combined into 2nd and 6th combined into 5th. The lever glided forward and back far too easily; we would have liked a more solid notch at each gear, as well as a digital display on the dash to reveal the selected gear. There's a Sport button, which raises the shifting point to a higher rpm, and we used it out on the highway. But the electronic program curiously appears to change both the shifting points and shifting speed based on how you drove the car in the previous couple minutes. When we were driving it hard out on the back roads, manual shifting by using the J-gate, one time it upshifted at redline 6500 with our foot on the floor; another time it upshifted at 5000 with our foot on the floor. We believe this happened because it shifted at the same place we had manually shifted it, previously.
In everyday driving, you just keep it in Drive and forget about it, of course. We found the shifts to be more relaxed than they needed to be; sharper and quicker would not have been aggressive or uncomfortable.
The brake pedal provided a substantial feel, neither firm nor soft, but giving. When they were applied lightly, the pedal bounced back as if it had a strong return spring. We did a panic stop at 70, a test, and the ABS system was silent and true, with effective anti-drive geometry. Next Page