Icons And Electrons

700 MILES ACROSS EUROPE IN JAGUAR’S TESLA FIGHTER

- Angus MacKenzie

Jabbeke was the making of the Jaguar XK120. On May 30, 1949, a prototype of the iconic English sports car was timed at 132.6 mph along a closed section of freeway just outside this Belgian town.

Seven decades on, Jabbeke looks like the breaking of the Jaguar I-Pace—the allwheel-drive electric crossover that’s as significant a Jaguar as the XK120. We’re plugged into the third fast charger we’ve found in the area, but energy is trickling into the battery. We arrived with 12 miles of range left. We could be here all night.

Why are we here? In the 1960s, Denis Jenkinson, the “continental correspondent” for Britain’s Motor Sport magazine—and the man who’d ridden alongside Stirling Moss en route to their victory in the 1955 Mille Miglia—drove his E-type across Europe from grand prix to grand prix. A half century later we’re attempting to drive more than 700 miles from London in a different type of e-Jaguar to an e-prix—the ninth round of the Formula E championship in Berlin. It’s been five hours since we arrived in Jabbeke. The romance is wearing thin.

We’ve learned a lot in those five hours. Many of the smart phone apps designed to find fast chargers in Europe are inaccurate and hard to use. There’s no easy way to pay for a charge—different suppliers require credit or debit card information on different apps, and some only accept a prepaid card. And our pre-production I-Pace will only take a trickling 22 kW from the Efacec chargers in this part of Belgium. A software issue, apparently.