Let me start by saying that I flew over to Britain from Los Angeles as a guest of Jaguar and McLaren, so I suppose you could say I’m not an impartial reviewer, but I know a good car when I drive one and the Jaguar XJ is a very good car.

The first pictures of the new model were released to the media last week. I was the only person outside Jaguar fortunate enough to drive one and I can tell you it was well worth the jet lag.

The new XJ is aimed squarely at taking on the likes of Mercedes and BMW. From the outside, it certainly looks the business. Get behind the wheel and I think it is more than a match for any of the big luxury sedans — or saloons, as you guys like to call them — and with a bit more soul. Sometimes the German sedans get accused of being a bit cold, but the Jag is a very warm car. It’s sporty, it’s fast and it has that classic Jaguar ride.

Y’know, cars ride a certain way because of where they’re developed. French cars ride like sofas because their roads are billiard-table smooth and that’s what they like. British cars have a firm but supple ride because they’re tested on these two-lane highways where they have to dart in and out and be able to handle well but still be comfortable. American cars have the classic boulevard ride: you get on the road in New York, you point the steering wheel towards California and you make maybe three turns the whole way there.

The XJ has all the characteristics you would expect from a really good British car, and then some. Let’s face it, though: British has not always meant best when it comes to automotive engineering. The sad thing is that for all the goodwill that Jaguar built up over the decades, a few years of electronic hiccups and what-not will haunt you for the next 20 or more. The days of being able to get by on a car that was a C+ grade are over. Anything less than an A- and you’re not even in the club any more, and Jaguar knows it.

I think what you have here now with Jaguar is a lean, mean company, which is pretty engineer-driven and is serious about building serious automobiles. People work best, in my opinion, when they have a target or a goal. In this case, the goal for Jaguar has been not just a thorough polishing of its tarnished image but to create a car to take on the big German brands on their own terms. It appears to have met the challenge.

Round the test track in Coventry last week the XJ was very secure — no scuttle shake or anything of that nature. Admittedly, the car I drove was a preproduction model, but I was told that it was pretty much exactly what the production model would feel like. If you said to someone, “Here is the big Mercedes S-class, here is the big Audi, here is the big Jag”, and if you blindfolded them, I’m not sure they could tell the difference in terms of driving. And I mean that as a compliment.

I was driving the normally aspirated version of the XJ, which seemed a nicely balanced package. And I would go for the short-wheelbase car rather than the long. If you look at the two of them side by side, it takes you a minute to realise which is the longer one, which I think is good. It shows you it’s not some freakishly stretched thing. But me, I like the short wheelbase. It’s lighter, probably more nimble and probably a bit faster.

The hard thing about building cars now is people don’t realise there are so many regulations, it’s hard to make cars unique and even harder to make them beautiful. But the Jag has a lot of really interesting features. I especially like the rear end and the way there’s a continuous flow to the bodywork. I love the panoramic glass roof. I like the optical illusion that the whole back of the car is glass, when actually it’s not. I think that’s a really nice touch. This looks and drives like a Jag for the 21st century.

Jaguar knows it has to satisfy two worlds. You’ve got those of us who remember the Mk 2s and the sedans and the XK120s, and we want our Jaguars with wood and the gentlemen’s club feel, and then you have young people who either don’t want the wood because they think it’s environmentally unsound or just think it seems like their father’s car. The choice of interiors, I think, is a wise one. Customers can choose between the carbon fibre and the traditional wood. For myself, I would choose the traditional wood.

I would recommend the XJ. It’s a rational choice, to my mind, but I bet most buyers will still arrive at it entirely irrationally. You’ll walk into the showroom, take one look at the car and fall in love, crossing your fingers and hoping that it’s reliable.

As with a really beautiful woman, you’ll presume it’s too good to be true, it’s probably trouble, but decide you’re willing to put up with it because it’s so damn gorgeous. That’s exactly the way it was with Jags in the 1950s and 1960s. You had a workforce here in America that didn’t understand those cars or how to work on them. They were not well supported by the factory back in the UK, so people did fixes on fixes. Still, people loved them so much they were willing to put up with whatever problems were involved.