Jaguar I-PACE SUV: Meet the luxury brand's first-ever electric vehicle

TNS:

The growl is gone, but the speed, performance and brand pizzazz haven't gone anywhere in the latest Jaguar. The British luxury automotive brand last week Thursday revealed its first-ever electric vehicle: the Jaguar I-PACE.

The 2019 I-PACE, which made its debut at a Jaguar plant in Austria, is a mid-size sport-utility vehicle with a range of 240 miles on a full battery charge. It goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.5 seconds and has 394 horsepower.

That's about the same as the range for the base model of perhaps the vehicle's toughest competitor, the Tesla Model X crossover.

Based on the Jaguar C-X75 concept vehicle, the I-PACE is set to hit US dealerships in the second half of 2018, and the company is now accepting orders. Jaguar will reveal pricing on Tuesday at the Geneva auto show.

The vehicle, which will be built in Austria, joins a growing line-up of Jaguar SUVs that have helped expand the luxury brand beyond its stalwart passenger cars.

The typical home-charging unit, which usually costs several hundred dollars, will allow I-PACE owners to fill up 80 per cent of their battery on electricity within about 10 hours. A rapid-charging unit would get an 80 per cent charge in 40 minutes.

The I-PACE will also usher in Jaguar's new infotainment system, dubbed Jaguar InControl Touch Pro Duo. The system uses artificial intelligence to "identify individual driver preferences", Jaguar said. It will also include Amazon's Alexa voice assistant.

Borrowing from Tesla's approach, the I-PACE will feature over-the-air software upgrades, which are still rare in the auto industry but allow for improvements without bringing the vehicle into the shop.