Jaguar XF Sportbrake review - Reliability & safety

This really is a game of two halves, because while the Jaguar XF Sportbrake should be a very safe car, it may not be a very reliable one.

Jaguar XF Sportbrake reliability

Jaguar doesn’t have a particularly strong record for reliability. It’s a few years ago now, but the XF has previously held the dubious distinction of being a last-place finisher in the Driver Power customer satisfaction survey. More recently the model hasn’t appeared at all, but the highest-placed Jaguar in the 2023 survey was the F-Pace SUV, which finished 50th from 75 cars. Jaguar itself did better overall, coming an impressive tenth when ranked against 31 other manufacturers, though this is mainly because owners love driving their cars so much – given 44% of respondents said they had some kind of fault with their car in the very first year of ownership, this still doesn’t bode well for longer-term dependability.

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Safety

The independent safety experts at Euro NCAP haven’t tested the XF since the current model’s 2015 debut, and have yet to test the XF Sportbrake at all. This means that its impressive five-star safety rating doesn’t necessarily still apply, though Jaguar has of course updated the car several times since launch, with the latest safety equipment among those updates. The data below pertains to that original test, where it scored 92% for adult occupant protection and 84% for child occupant ratings.

And while nobody wants to be hit by a car while out walking, the XF is one of the better cars out there when it comes to pedestrian impacts: its 80% score in this area was partly thanks to the active bonnet, which pops up if it detects an imminent impact with a pedestrian, keeping soft body parts away from hard engine components.

Standard driver assistance features in the XF Sportbrake now include front and rear parking sensors and a rear camera, rear collision and rear traffic monitors, blind spot assist, driver condition monitor, traffic sign recognition with an adaptive speed limiter, lane keep assist, emergency braking, and adaptive cruise control – basically, everything you’d expect from a car at this position in the market.