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COMPARISON TEST: Jaguar XKR Vs. BMW M6
Written by: Autocar staff
London, UK ? 9/15/2006 
The M6 and XKR appeal to different audiences but have surprisingly close capabilities.
The following story is abridged from an article appearing in the Sept. 6 issue of Autocar magazine. -Ed.
Before you read so much as a sentence more of this story, let?s get one thing clear from the outset: despite what the pictures and your preconceptions might lead you to believe, this is not in any normal sense a twin test.
If we were at all flippant about what we do on this magazine, it could quite easily be construed as such. Because we know already that Jaguar?s new XKR is a fine sporting coupe, having discovered as much when we drove it in isolation and came away breathless about its attributes.
We know too that the BMW M6 is a thumping good car, one that already operates in a broadly similar market to the XKR, in that it has two doors, comes with a prestige badge on its nose and costs more than the British Prime Minister will earn in a year...
But in the real world we know that the M6 and XKR not only appeal to very different audiences. The Jag has an automatic transmission, and is designed primarily to waft its way across the motoring landscape, albeit at a fairly serious lick courtesy of its supercharged 420hp V8 engine. The M6, on the other hand, boasts 500 rip-snorting horsepower from its V10 engine and is to the world of luxury coupes what a backhoe is to a spot of household gardening.
And yet putting them together seemed like such a natural thing to do, if only because it would be the best way possible to gauge just how good the XKR really is. In the end, our thinking went something like this: no, it may not be a fair or especially relevant comparison in pure consumer terms, but if the Jaguar XKR can get close to the M6 on the road, wouldn?t that be a fine result for Coventry? Especially at a time when Jaguar could use all the help it can get.
So despite what Jaguar itself wanted us to do (which was to compare the XKR with the five-year-old Mercedes SL500) and ignoring our traditional desires to match cars as closely as possible before comparing them, in this instance we let our imagination do the walking. Call it a meeting rather than a comparison if you like. Either way, this is what happened when XKR squared up to M6.
The BMW is a more dynamic machine than the Jag, but is that enough?
To begin with, it knocked seven bells out of its opponent from Munich and had it reeling on the canvas, whimpering. How so? Because the Jag looks about 568,000 times better than the BMW in the raw. It?s more elegant from just about every angle, is better proportioned and is the only one you could describe, hand on heart, as beautiful.
Yes, the M6 looks more purposeful, that?s undeniable. And yes, it looks tougher and faster and meaner than the XKR. But the Jag is so much more graceful overall that you end up not looking at the BMW at all when the two of them are parked side by side. Nor do the general public, if the reaction on the Jag?s launch in Spain (where we ?met? the two cars) was anything to go by. The BMW was ignored, the Jag universally swooned over.
And by the way, the XKR does purposeful as well as gorgeous nowadays, especially around the nose, which looks way better in this guise than it does in regular XK form. All but gone is any passing resemblance to an oversized Hyundai Coupe. Instead, the XKR now has a distinct whiff of Aston Martin to its front end. Which is fine, unless you?ve recently parted with $200,000 in exchange for a DB9.
But compare the interiors of the two cars and instantly the tables are spun through 180 degrees, partly because of the M6?s rather delicious cabin (you get what you pay for in here, especially in the case of the test car?s gray Nappa leather and carbon fiber dash), but also because the XKR?s interior is curiously plain and doesn?t look especially fabulous.
XKR produces more tire noise than the M6, but the test car's 20in. rubber may have made the difference.
The trouble with the R?s cabin is that there?s too little to distinguish it from that of the regular XK. Fair enough, you get beefier sports seats, a few ?R? logos here and there, and some brushed aluminum on the fascia, but it?s hardly a makeover to take your breath away. As for the leatherette (as in leather-look plastic) on the dash and door inserts, let?s just say it feels ? and looks ? decidedly second class beside the BMW?s full leather interior. That?s a seriously disappointing discovery.
Quite why Jaguar doesn?t offer leather as standard and then more luxurious upgrades as an option is hard to fathom beyond pure cost grounds. You touch the dash, feel the tacky material and think: ?Where else did they try to save money in this car??
That?s a travesty, because mechanically this is without doubt Jaguar?s finest hour and its most committed car ever in engineering terms. Don?t be fooled by the big, but not monumental, outputs from the supercharged engine, either. On paper the XKR looks as if it should get walloped by rivals such as the M6 and SL55, both of which have around 500hp and, in the case of the Mercedes, not far off 500lb ft of torque as well.
In reply, the XKR musters a mere 420hp and 413lb ft of torque. Good, but not mind-bending, vital statistics ? until you factor in the XKR?s weight. Which is when it gets more interesting.
The smaller, more compact and largely aluminum Jaguar weighs just 3671 lbs ? around 330 lbs lighter than the M6 and almost 660 lbs less than the Mercedes. So although it may not shred the rulebook with its outputs, in practice the XKR can easily live with its rivals on performance, and guzzles around 10 percent less fuel into the bargain.
Back to back from a standing start, the XKR doesn?t have quite the same bombastic response as the M6, although the figures show them to be almost inseparable from 0-60mph (Jag 4.9sec, M6 4.7sec). The real difference comes if you nail the throttle open at 5000rpm in third gear: then the M6 feels devastatingly quick, the Jag merely very strong. But then, not many road cars at any price feel as intense as an M6 as it homes in on its 8500rpm rev limiter.
With such a beautiful exterior, it?s a crying shame that the Jag?s cabin doesn?t feel more special.
Yet in its way the XKR feels every bit as impressive as the BMW in a straight line, especially across the sort of gently undulating, constantly winding motorways that typify the northern Spanish road network. They are the equivalent of a fast, sweeping country road or a decent divided highway, and that?s where there?s virtually nothing to separate an XKR from an M6.
Except for the way their chassis respond, where the Jag once again shows the M6 the way home. It?s so soothing to drive rapidly across roads like these that I find it difficult to think of any car, at any price, that does it better. And by ?it? I mean waft effortlessly from apex to apex, steering wheel fidgeting delicately between the palms of your hands, tires relaying every nuance of the surface beneath, but without ever intruding unnecessarily into the cabin.
The XKR is such a composed machine that at three-figure speeds on a flowing highway it makes the M6 feel surprisingly neurotic, edgy and unrefined.
And here are some other observations you might find surprising, controversial or hard to stomach, depending on your perspective and loyalty to the two brands. The Jaguar steers better than the M6. It has more feel, more precision and it delivers more readable feedback about what the front tires are up to ? be that at 10mph or 110mph. It also rides better, on any road and at any speed. And it has less understeer when you really start to lean on it, again either at 30mph through a tight hairpin or at 100mph through a fast sweeper.
It?ll also go just as sideways as the M6 if you want it to. If you press the traction control button and hold it down for 10 seconds, all the safety systems on the Jag disengage. Which makes you wonder about the necessity of BMW?s expensive M-differential. No, you can?t do 150-yard powerslides in the XKR, whereas you can in the M6, but just how high is this on your list of priorities when you?re buying a $100,000 high-performance, luxurious coupe?
Where the Jag can?t match the M6, amazingly, is on tire and wind noise. You?d expect the intentionally more restrained XKR to blow a machine as thrusting as the M6 away when it comes to such things, but in reality it?s the other way round. True, the test XKR we drove came shod with optional 20in. Dunlop SP Sport Maxx rubber, whereas the standard car wears 19in. tires, but it?s hard to see how the standard car on 19s could match the hushed M6 at a steady freeway cruise. And tires make not one jot of difference to wind noise, an area in which the Jaguar definitely has to bow to the BMW.
The quality of the M6?s interior is simply stunning, especially with the optional Nappa leather.
And so we end up in a place that?s not where we expected at all. Because in reality these cars are close enough in ability, if not personality, to justify the comparison we originally dared not make.
The truth is, we thought the XKR would get whipped by the M6, given how highly we regard the BMW and how much ground Jaguar had to make up over the previous XKR. But it seems Jaguar?s philosophy of getting the basic XK as right as possible from the beginning, then ?turning up the volume by a third,? has worked, and worked in spades.
BMW?s method was the exact opposite in producing the M6, which was developed as an entirely separate model at the same time and alongside the regular 6-series. As a result, it?s a more distinct and dynamic machine on the surface. But boy does the XKR run it close.
As we said in the beginning and will remind you again now, this is not a twin test. Which is a pity because the XKR might well have won it?
Steve Sutcliffe/Autocar
http://www.speedtv.com/articles/automotive/newmodels/32561/
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