What Happens When You Do A Burnout In An Open-Diff Car With Torque Vectoring?

Since taking delivery of our Jaguar XE S longtermer, we’ve been intrigued by its drivetrain setup. It does without a limited-slip differential, but you do get torque vectoring by braking. This is supposed to act like an LSD, by applying small amounts of braking to alter the speeds of each of the rear wheels.

So, you shouldn’t get one wheel spinning up madly on its own, otherwise affectionately known as one tyre fire. To test just how effective it is, we thought we’d do the mature thing and perform a ruddy great burnout.

As you can see, it does ‘lock’ the wheels as an LSD would and rather nicely smokes both rear tyres (sorry, Jaguar…), but how well does it do some equally mature skids? Once you push past the initial understeer the XE S will happily shake its rear end about, but in our little test, the 335bhp Jaguar seemed very keen to light up just one wheel. So, the vectoring system can mimic an LSD, but not under every situation.

As to how it would perform when doing proper, full-on powerslides, we’re not yet sure. If we get the chance to try it out, you’ll be the first to know…