At Other People’s Cars, nothing concerns us more than the environment. So with careful thought, we’ve arranged to test these…massive SUVs. Seriously.
Typically when we talk about the demise of fossil fuels, someone invariably makes a case for the electric hybrid car. Compact family oriented offerings like the Toyota Prius. Invariably still, someone, perhaps not a Volkswagen driver, will make a counter argument for turbo diesels, with their presumably greener eco credentials and excellent fuel consumption. They would then duke it out with miniscule 3 cylinder engines before eventually, praising the hybrid for being clever then dismissing it altogether for the marginally more frugal diesel and usually because the act of actually physically plugging in a hybrid is too much of a pain in their busy lives. For our evaluation we’ve aimed higher. Bigger.
The face-off is between a Jaguar F-Pace that runs on a fuel efficient (or is it?) 3.0 V6 turbo diesel and a tech-laden Volvo XC90 T8 hybrid. There are very different cars with numbers and figures that are so far off from one another.
The Jaguar pushes out 221 kW and 700 Nm, while the Volvo delivers 331 kW and 680 Nm. The zero-to-100 km/h sprint is completed in 6.2 seconds and 5.5 seconds for the F-Pace and XC90, respectively, while CO2 emissions stand at 159g for the former and a mere 49 for the latter. But the numbers that we wanted to test with this video is the claimed fuel consumption. Jaguar claims that its first SUV guzzles 6-litres/100km while the smartly dressed Swede claims 2.1-litres/100km.
Kelly, for some reason, decided to take the Jaguar and challenge me, in the Volvo, to a fuel run. It did not go as planned. Watch the video to see how it all went down…