The 2024 Jaguar F-Type R75 is a Scintillating Swan Song (POV Drive Review)

Hey crew, I've got the key to that 24 Jaguar F-Type R75. We are going to take it for a drive, but first let's check out how it looks on the inside and outside. The 24 model year is the last production year of the F-Type, which happens to coincide with the brand's 75th birthday. So this R75 edition gets the blacked-out treatment of things like the gloss black of this grille, matte black for the Jaguar badge and F-Type logo down low, plus the R badge there. We've got some very slender LED projector headlights with LED DRLs and turn signals. Beneath those are functional corner vents and air curtains to cool the front brakes and tires. Up on the long hood, we've got a pair of functional heat extractors and this one is painted in Carpathian gray metallic, which is a neat color, but it doesn't come anywhere close to the best color for this car, British Racing Green. You know with BRG, yeah, you know me. I'm sorry. At the side, the R75 gets a special set, special set of 20-inch wheels in this satin gray finish and I just, I don't know what it is about gray wheels. I think they just fade in too much and I think wheels should be a visual contrast. They don't do it for me. There is the contrast of the red painted brake calipers and these wheels are wrapped in Pirelli PZero tires, 265 section front and 305 section rear. Behind the front wheels are unique R75 badges. You get a blacked-out side garnish, body color matching door mirror caps, the door handles, flush mount, then pop out like this to allow entry. Stepping back to look at the profile, look at these proportions. The elongated hood, the very gentle taper of that roofline right into the hatch and then getting to the rear, those haunches, looks like it's coiled back to pounce. There are slender LED taillights with LED turn signals. Beneath is a super-sized and yet sculpted diffuser with four cannons, four exhaust outlets. Don't fire on me, R75, please. The rear-end view, probably my favorite, and the entire exterior is just luscious. Here's my question for you. Is it time for the F-Type to go or are you going to be sad? I know I am. Let me know in the comments and let's check out the opening up and looking inside. At this ebony interior with a suede-wrapped headliner, giant sunroof, and Windsor leather sport bucket seats with a cool quilted pattern, they're heated and ventilated as standard and power adjusting. With these controls here in the door beneath three positions of memory, you get two one-touch windows, power adjusting and power folding door mirrors, a Meridian sound system for the quilted leather on the doors and its leather on the armrest with some padding. Down here, though, it goes to straight-up hard plastics. There are also hard plastics for this scuff plate but this special R75 tread plate is in aluminum. There's also aluminum accenting for the foot pedals and Jaguar floor mats. Hit this button to raise the hatch and find 14 cubic feet of space. Easy to access with this nice large opening. Also in the trunk is a spot to add wiper fluid and there's a leather-wrapped grab handle but you don't need it to close the hatch because you got a button instead. No lock button from back here, that's important. And one more note before we get in, you have power adjustments for the steering wheel. It's not so low that it's hard to get inside. Door close noise? Very solid indeed. Hit the start stop button to put us in accessory mode. That's going to turn on our digital gauge cluster, infotainment system, and raise up the air vents which are above. Another special R75 badge. The gauge cluster is reconfigurable with these buttons on the wheel. We've got paddles on the back of the wheel. They feel kind of cheap, though. I think they're plastic, not aluminum. It is a leather-wrapped wheel. It feels excellent in the hands with the perforated leather. We've got an R badge down here. It's a heated steering wheel. There is no head-up display but we do have stitched leather up on the dashboard. This little button pops open your glove box. Don't need to see all that junk in there. 10-inch touchscreen infotainment system is kind of a last-generation graphics situation. It's reasonably responsive and it does have wired, not wireless, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Beneath the screen are dual-zone auto climate dials with a rubberized texture. Very easy to use those and the toggles beneath. DC outlet there. Volume knob. Some drive settings and drive mode selector. Leather wrapping around your gear selector and I appreciate that they kept the black usage to a minimum. Surrounding that, we've got textured silver trim and leather beneath all the way up your ground handle for your passenger. This soft black trim is better than gloss black. Two cupholders are inside there. Leather topping for your console and inside is not much storage at all. You do have two USB-A ports and a DC outlet plus there's a netted pouch up here to hold not sure what. Visibility is good up until you get to that pillar and the view out the back is somewhat constrained. Thankfully, there's standard blind spot monitoring with rear cross traffic and headroom for me at six feet tall is good. Head clears the roof. That gets the thumbs up and this cabin overall is still a very stylish place to be all these years later especially in the caramel color contrasted by British Racing Green. Yeah, there's some trim materials that don't belong in a cabin that's $120,000 but let's leave the overall value for the drive to decide. All right, let's fire it up. It's a fairly subdued startup roar from a supercharged V8. Do love the air vents raising. It's just a little welcome for you and welcome to you cabin camera. Thank you for joining me today for the drive review of the Jaguar F-Type R75. One extra little thing to show you that I didn't during the interior walk around. See this very thin sun visor which has to be thin so you can still see the road. Look at how dainty this little mirror is. You need like little hands to operate it. I just like cute little things like that. Gets me. Drive modes. So we've got normal, dynamic, and a wet weather mode. We're just going to start in normal so you don't have to do anything and then to go in reverse click in on the trigger on the back and bring it forward. That brings up a pretty high resolution backup camera. We don't have different camera angles. No bird's eye view or anything like that. You can just add some grid lines to your backup camera. So we'll scoot on out of here. We do have trajectory lines. Always useful. And down into drive and away we go. Let's kick things off with the world famous horn test. That felt pretty powerful for the smaller sports coupe. Turn signal sound. Don't mind it at all. I also don't mind this engine at all. 5 liter supercharged V8 in the F-Type R. It is unchanged in the 75 version special edition of the R so it still makes 575 horsepower and 516 pound feet of torque routed through an 8-speed ZF automatic transmission and sent exclusively to all four tires. You cannot get the R models in rear wheel drive. I love this engine. I love that you can still get this engine in a JLR product. You can have it in the regular F-Type, the P450 as well. There it just only makes 444 horsepower not 575. But because this motor has now been phased out of the new Range Rover SVR. Now they're just calling it SV. Instead they're using a twin turbo V8 sourced from BMW. The 5 liter supercharged V8 is a rare bird and that's just a wonderful motor paired with this silky smooth ZF 8-speed. Speaking of smooth, the brake pedal is so easy to finesse and just come up to a smooth stop. Then even in normal mode it's velvety in its forward progress. You do not feel those gear changes and you do not ever worry for lack of power. And yet it's not frightening to drive in the slightest. In normal mode the throttle response is perfectly measured to your input of throttle. Gorgeous. These sport bucket seats are just delightfully crafted. They curve around my body in the most comforting way. I think without this giant panoramic sunroof I might feel a little claustrophobic with the low headliner here at high dash. But with it we've got plenty of light inside this cabin so it just feels spot on for the scenery. Let's see about the turning radius. Wheel cranked. Hey that's that's quite good. And no rear wheel steering system to help us out. That's just a great turning radius. The cert part of the rev range looked to be around 3500 rpm. Baffles in the exhaust open up. We're going to hear more of that in just a moment but for now let's talk about the ride quality which on these mostly very smooth roads is phenomenal. But even when I got the F-Type onto a more jagged road surface it had the typical sports car jitteriness like the F-Type's always on its toes but the dampening remains spectacular absorbing the road blemishes so your body doesn't have to. Right now my body wants to absorb some g-force so we're going to see how quick the F-Type R75 gets to 60 with a real world zero to 60 test. Look at that beautiful dvs. Hello. Now here's something peculiar. The F-Type R doesn't have a launch control system. Instead we're just going to go into dynamic. That doesn't turn off the start stop system so I'll do that manually. Then go into sport, hold my foot on the brake for a little boost and let go. Who needs launch control? 3.6 seconds to 60. The all-wheel drive system just went. Just put the power down flawlessly. But that was just a warm-up. There's so much more here. Oh my gosh and the noise. The noise is sensational. Oh it goes to the heart of me. Listen to this. I adore it. I adore that sound. Yes. You beastly cat. More you say? Happy to oblige. Does not get old. Now we need to test out manual mode. So just pulling the paddle activates that. There's no way to lock it in manual mode though so if you don't use the paddles after a while let it go back to auto. Pretty quick shifts. It's letting me go all the way out to red line. That's what I'm looking for. Darn it that's good. Is it weird you get more snarl in manual? Good heavens. I love it. You know what I don't love though? The feel of the paddles. As I said in the interior walkway, they're kind of cheap. The travel's okay but the feel of them is not great. Now before I stop misbehaving we do need to see how the F-Type R gets through a braking and handling test. So I'm going to carry some speed into this curve then clamp down hard on the brakes and chuck it in. Here we go. Full ABS. Quite a bit of movement side to side. Steering feels good. Heavy hand of lean. It will rotate. No plow as far as I notice. Let's go for round two. Yeah okay so the power is never in question and the all-wheel drive system with the limited slip differential can get it to the ground but I gotta say the body control is not excellent in the F-Type R. There's quite a bit of roll in the corners which in some vehicles can mean communication and this one because of the velocity that you're able to generate is more scary than anything else and I don't like scary. Not when piloting something with this much power. So that needed to be tightened up for me to feel confident doing these kind of maneuvers every single day and then even pushing it a bit further. So there are limitations certainly. The steering was quite good actually. I had a good amount of communication from the rack. It's light but it's super super accurate. That was awesome. The brakes were strong enough but again with all of the undulation that the car is doing under hard braking, nose to tail, side to side, it just doesn't inspire the confidence that you need. Now since we find ourselves on the highway let's just quiet up for a moment. I'm telling myself quiet up and listen for the NVH level. All right so the tire noise isn't really a big issue but I'm shocked at how much wind noise I'm hearing for such a slippery silhouette vehicle. It's just quite a bit of that that's seeping in through and so that means at the highway speeds you might have to raise your voice a little bit when you're talking to your fellow passenger even though they're what eight inches away. So a little louder than I would like and also lacking in certain features that seem to align themselves well with luxury vehicles that you may want to take on a longer trip like adaptive cruise control or lane keep assist or steering assistance. You don't have those. You just have regular cruise control which is nice so your foot doesn't get tired but that's tech we've had for decades. Now let's get into my miles per hour word of the day which for the 24 Jaguar F-Type R 75 is exuberant meaning lively energy or excitement. I'm picturing an exuberant person entering a room. You know when one of those people enters the room because the air changes like you sense their energy and you feel more lively yourself and that's the sense I get from the F-Type R. It's a car that when it arrives it makes a darn entrance. You hear it you see those gorgeous body panels and you feel a little more excited even if you're not the driver. Before we talk pricing and competition let's discuss the top speed and fuel economy. Top speed for the F-Type R is a very healthy 186 miles per hour and the fuel economy is respectable at 16 mpg in the city 24 on the highway and 18 combined. The starting price for the R 75 coupe is 114,000 bucks and this one as tested is around 121 grand and that price point puts it in some very heady competition. On the performance oriented side of things we've got the Chevy Corvette C06 which starts at $109,000 if you can find one. It makes 670 horsepower gets to 60 in 2.7 seconds has a top speed of 195 miles per hour and fuel economy of 14 combined or there from Porsche you've got two vehicles you can look at the 718 Cayman GT4 or you can look at the 911T. We'll just focus on the 718. So the GT4 starts at about $108,000. It makes 414 horsepower gets to 60 in 3.8 seconds and has fuel economy of 21 combined. If you want to look at the luxury end of things there's the Lexus LC 500 which starts at a deal that's 95,600 bucks. It makes 471 horsepower from its NA V8 gets to 60 in 4.7 seconds has a top speed of 168 miles per hour and fuel economy of 19 combined. The problem with the Jaguar F-Type R is that it is neither sporty enough nor luxurious enough for me to give it my vote. I would either go get the CO6 and spend probably six months looking for it but be very happy when I found one and just obliterate anything else on a Cayman road or track or if I was thinking more about daily luxury and auditory excitement then I would have the LC 500. For quite a bit less money you're getting that glorious NA V8 noise and you're getting better ride quality and almost equally good looks. The F-Type though it does have a winner in its ranks and that is the entry-level P450. The P450 still has the supercharged V8, still get a great noise, you get strong power, you get sensuous styling. That's the version of this car that's a real winner and that's the version of this car I'm going to miss most when it's discontinued. The R is fun, it's exciting, it's not worth the premium to me. I'd probably get the roadster version of the F-Type P450 to be honest and just sit back and enjoy. Which would you guys choose? That's what I want to know. Would you have the F-Type R75? Would you have the 718 Cayman GT4? Would you have the Corvette CO6? Again if you could find one. Would you have the 911T? Would you have the LC 500? Let me know in the comments and I hope you guys have enjoyed this POV Drive Review. If you did please like, comment, and share it. Subscribe to the channel, hit that bell to get notified. We're going to cancel cruise control because we're going to need to put our foot all the way down. Before I say I'll see you next time.