As a penniless student I used to go to a car auction in north Manchester that was widely famed for both the grottiness of its cars and the lowness of its prices.
As long as you kept your hands in your pockets it offered a cheap evening out, with plenty of amusement in both the auctioneer's cliche-ridden spiel and the generally dire quality of the cars he was trying to encourage interest in. This was the sort of place you could buy a Maestro with latticework wings and a fortnight's MOT for £50, or a Nissan Bluebird with holes where the private hire plates had been screwed being sold as having belonged to a nervous widow.
Yes, it really does exist!
Yet sometimes out-of-place cars did sneak in, none more incongruous than the night a Jaguar XJ40 arrived. It was clean, unrusty and without either the blue smoke or obvious signs of damage that marked out most of the auction's newer entries. Among the lines of rusty sub-bangers it shone like a glitter ball in a pigsty. How had something so nice ended up in a place like this?
All quickly became obvious when the auctioneer got into his stride. "1987 Jaguar XJ, beautiful car this, with the economical 2.9 engine that can do 35mpg all day. Also the desirable option of a manual gearbox, they didn't make many like this, one for keen drivers. Who'll start me at £1,000?"
Nobody did. I don't remember exactly what this absolute-base XJ made, but it was a serious discount over one fitted with an autobox and an engine with more power than a food blender. Even back then the idea of a Jaguar saloon with DIY gears seemed obviously wrong to the bargain-seeking rabble at a scuzzy car auction. Yet 20 years later and after killing off the manual gearbox entirely Jaguar is bringing it back again.
Which is why, when invited to come and drive the new XF in the UK for the first time, my instinct wasn't to try and elbow my way into the most powerful version. Rather to find one fitted with the clutch pedal that's likely to be an option chosen less often than metallic purple paint. The six-speed manual is only being offered with the four-cylinder diesel engine in either 163hp or 180hp states of tune, and saves a useful £750 over the equivalent autobox.
It's a Jaguar XF, but not quite as we know it...
Studying the list of available cars revealed the presence of my unicorn, a single 163hp 'E-Prestige' six-speeder among the V6 autos. Hopes that this would be a rare chance to drive a base press car were dashed by a serious options workout, lifting the basic £32,300 to £44,890. Good luck when this one ends up in an auction hall...
Just finding a Jaguar XF with a gearstick where the company normally fits the circular controller for the autobox comes as a bit of a surprise, as does finding a clutch pedal in the footwell. Prior to the company's recent change of heart the last Jaguar manual was the Mondeo-based X-Type, which died in 2009, the first-generation XF never offered with anything other than an autobox.
The new Ingenium diesel engine is impressively quiet at idle, but resting a hand on the gearlever reveals a surprising amount of buzzing vibration; it's clear that the NVH reduction budget was mostly spent before the manual was considered. The shift action doesn't possess the sort of sharpness or accuracy to get you thinking of surgical instruments, but there's a nice weight to it and the gears are where you expect to find them. The engine has an anti-stall function that boosts revs if you lift the clutch without pressing the throttle - tricky things, these manual gearboxes - but that doesn't make itself felt beyond car park manoeuvring speed.
The reason for that anti-stall is revealed at a T-junction, the engine lacking much in the way of basement oomph. Try to pull out without accelerating hard enough and the XF feels momentarily bogged down in a boostless hinterland. It's clearly been designed to work with a quick-witted autobox that can slip its torque converter and kick the turbo into life.
There probably won't be many, but it's far from bad!
No great surprise that it doesn't feel quite as well-developed as the autobox that will outsell it by a huge margin. But over a longer drive I did find myself warming to the manual and the new-found freedom to decide which gear to be in, and the need to anticipate what happens next. While XFs fitted with the eight-speed autobox kick down under anything but the most gentle pressure on the throttle it's nice to be able to enjoy the engine's solid mid-range torque, or even take it beyond the 3,800rpm where the auto seems to shift even in kick-down if the mood takes you.
Having paid to develop a manual box for the F Type it made sense for Jaguar to also offer it in the closely related XE and XF, the three all sharing the same ZF transmission. The official logic is that this is an inexpensive way to broaden the car's appeal into a small, but significant niche.
It's unlikely to be a mainstream choice. Audi says that a quarter of British A6 sales are still made with a manual transmission, which surprised me slightly, but that's down from a third last year. But at the other end of the scale Mercedes stopped offering a manual on UK-bound E-Classes last year; apparently only one in 100 were being ordered with it. I doubt there's much pent-up demand for an XF with a clutch pedal, but it's nice to be offered the choice again.
JAGUAR XF 2.0d PRESTIGE
Engine: 1,999cc four-cylinder
Transmission: 6-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 163@4,000rpm
Torque (lb ft): 280@1,750rpm
0-62mph: 8.2sec
Top speed: 132mph
Weight: 1,545kg
MPG: 70.6 (NEDC combined)
CO2: 104g/km
Price: £32,300 (£44,890 as tested)