Alright all you Bahn-burners, Merc pilots, Beemer drivers, and Audi flyers, Jaguar is here to say, “Not so fast, chaps!” The Jaguar XE SV Project 8 aims to be the veddy British, veddy quick answer to “Who builds the world’s fastest sedan"” And with a 200 mph top speed and a Nürburgring Nordschleife lap time in the low 7:20s, you Germans best listen up.
Jaguar Special Vehicle Operations is putting the finishing touches on the soon-to-be-released XE SV Project 8, “the fastest and most thrilling of all road-legal four-door sedans.” Let’s just take that as a factual statement for now, and leave the fuming and raging you can hear emanating from Germany as distant thunder to be dealt with later. Bolder & Badder
The Project 8 is a big, four-door sedan with a zero to 60 time of just 3.4 seconds. That’s impressive, given how large and heavy these cats are. They weigh just under 3,900 lbs. (after going on a significant diet) and are over 15 feet long. No one is going to mistake this for a Lotus, but that made little difference to the stopwatch when the Jaguar XE SV Project 8 sedan set a lap time of 7 minutes 21.23 seconds at the Nordschleife, quicker than the old four-door record by more than 10 seconds.
Overcoming all that heft and size is a 592 horsepower version of the “normal” supercharged Jaguar 5.0-liter V8, making the XE SV Project 8 the most powerful Jaguar road car to date. That big powerplant lives ...