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This is, if not the greatest Jag ever built, certainly one of the top two or three. Oh heck, let's just say it is the greatest Jaguar ever built--even though our car was just an engineering prototype mule.

The Jaguar XKR-S convertible is the performance version of the XKR, which was itself pretty performance-oriented to begin with. So it's double-performance-oriented, like double-secret probation. It wrings another 40 hp and 41 lb-ft of torque from the XKR's 5.0-liter supercharged V8. With that power and torque the mighty XKR-S rockets to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds and--here's the difference a Jag makes--feels perfectly comfortable doing it. Comparisons that came to mind while we were driving it were with two-seaters, not this car's 2+2 configuration. We thought of the Mercedes-Benz SLS and a few Astons Martin. There are only a handful of GTs that compete with it.

We drove the coupe version of the XKR-S last June and ran out of laudatory words after only a few paragraphs. The convertible version is the same only more: more stylish, more exclusive, more expensive. Jaguar will bring only 25 of these into the United States in 2012, priced at $138,000 each. Be sure and comment below that a Chevrolet Corvette/Cadillac CTS-V/Mitsubishi 3000GT/Volga Sputnik/whatever will do "the same thing fer half tha' price!" While you might find a faster, less expensive car, it would be difficult to find one that achieved this speed and composure while transmitting such confidence from behind the wheel and doing it so effortlessly.

Read more: http://www.autoweek.com/article/2011...#ixzz1dtgoUGku