CARS.COM — Who the hell gets their hands on a $47,000 luxury performance sedan for the weekend and thinks, hey, we should totally go camping? This guy.
Related: 2017 Jaguar XE Review
Having already read a review of the 2017 Jaguar XE by Cars.com's Kelsey Mays, I knew that the small sedan's 15.9 cubic feet of trunk space rivals some midsize sedans, which I met with a hastily dismissive, "It'll be fiiine"! To be fair, camping in the XE, in and of itself, wouldn't have been so hard to accommodate — but the decision to make it a stand-up paddleboarding weekend as well complicated car-loading considerations.
Pack It Up, Pack It In
The bulk of our camping gear comprises two large plastic bins containing cookware, mosquito spray, campfire implements, flashlights and bedding, plus a full-size cooler, a dome tent and a couple of small folding beach chairs. The trunk couldn't accommodate the cooler, nor could it share space with the equipment bins in the cabin. Luckily, both bins fit snugly in the trunk, but they left no room for anything else we needed to bring.
That left just the backseat for everything else — which was still a lot of big, bulky stuff: a full-size suitcase containing clothes, toiletries and beach towels, as well as the tent, cooler and chairs. Then there was our paddleboarding equipment. When broken down, our pair of inflatable boards fit into large backpacks, comparable in size and bulk to the type, say, Reese Witherspoon lugged on her cross-country hike in "Wild." That's in addition to the portable foam-rubber roof rack set we brought along so we could avoid inflating and deflating the boards between trips to the water.
With all that stuff crammed into the cabin, if we'd have put even one more item of any significant size in, visibility out of the rear windshield would've been zero. As it was — particularly given the backup camera, optional blind spot monitoring system, front and rear parking aids, and reverse traffic detection on the model I was testing — I felt confident I could proceed safely.
#PaddleboardProblems
Once we'd trekked 54 miles from our downtown Chicago home to summer-resort town New Buffalo, Mich., unloaded our gear and set up our campsite, we were able to reclaim the entirety of our cabin space. Now, however, about half the stuff previously inside the car — namely the paddleboards and the portable roof rack — had to be placed on top of the car. The XE's roof easily accommodated the rack, which consists of four nonslip, foam-rubber bricks and canvas straps that wrap around the stacked boards, into the cabin (closed into the doors' window frames) and across the ceiling.
Unfortunately, between the extra care necessary to negotiate a cargo-stuffed car at highway speeds to our destination and, upon arrival, tooling around town with two 10-foot paddleboards strapped to the roof, we never really got to indulge in the performance part of this performance sedan. Our test car was equipped with Jaguar's robust 340-horsepower, supercharged 3.0-liter engine mated to an eight-speed automatic transmission.
Making a Spectacle
Moreover, the view from that lovely standard moonroof was blocked the majority of the trip by the boards. Everyone else's view, however, of "those people camping in a Jaguar" was decidedly unobstructed. The XE's sleek-but-subtle exterior styling is an elegant treat. Despite the dusty, sandy milieu of the Lake Michigan beach community, it's a stunner in white and looked great parked next to my tent. Our test 35t Prestige model with options comes to a sticker price of $46,595 including a $995 destination charge.
The XE turned heads and elicited comments from curious vacationers everywhere we went, from the campsite owner "wondering who in the world takes a Jaguar camping," to a kayak-rental employee offering generously to trade us for his Honda Civic, to a group of surly fisherman speculating skeptically about what I did for a living.
You can imagine their disappointment when I informed them I was a journalist and not, like, a tech-startup entrepreneur (or a drug dealer, because let's face it, that's what they were thinking) — but I still get to drive the cars.