Off road, astonishingly, it’s also pretty good. It is of course from the Land Rover stable, so one might expect competent engineering up and down steep, slippery hills. But you don’t expect it in an electric, luxury Jaguar, yet we forded a rocky Portugese stream and climbed at 15mph up a dusty rutted hillside track, the electric motor on each axel sending the required torque to each wheel when it slipped.
At Portimao, Piquet Junior, on a brief break between Formula E rounds, flung us round the track in the car, which was impressive, but largely meaningless unless your school run takes in the Nürburgring.
But there’s power aplenty for this two-tonne car; at 70mph on the motorway, there’s a surprising surge of power on tap still for overtaking. At speed, the road and wind noise seem obtrusive, but it’s hard to argue how much of that is due to the absence of engine noise. If you fancy some of that, by the way, you can slide a button in settings to introduce some artificial engine noise. And if you happen to have shifted from Comfort to Dynamic driving mode (there’s also eco, for when you need to conserve some charge), you get an extra bout of rorty “exhaust” noise. One senses artificial engine noise will disappear as a car offering in a few years, when people have got their heads round power equalling revs.
What takes some getting used to, still, is regenerative braking. You can choose a less severe setting in the I-Pace, but with the system full on, the car becomes operable with simply the throttle pedal – lift off it from 50mph and you’ll come to a complete stop in good time. I imagine most people will use the full function in order to recoup as much battery power as possible.
Which brings us to the only bone of contention with this car: charging it. I feel badly for the car makers: here they are, building the future and doing it very well, and the charging infrastructure just isn’t keeping pace, despite what people like Chargemaster say. Yes, there are enough public charging points for the number of electric cars on our roads, because the vast majority of owners charge at home or work, but only 1,000 of them in the UK today are 50kW rapid chargers. The I-Pace needs a 100kW, or 150kW rapid charger to fulfil the claimed 0-80pc charge in 40 minutes, and the earliest the UK will get its first 150kW rapid charger is the end of this year.