This Could Be a Very Exclusive Wagon It would be hard for Jaguar to have gotten off to a worse start if they were truly attempting to impress me with their new X-Type wagon this week.
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| My week test driving the new Jaguar X-Type wagon got off to a pretty shaky start. (Photo: Shawn Pisio, Canadian Auto Press) |
First of all, just like when the Ford owned Aston Martin Jaguar Land Rover division booked me a Range Rover and never told me they had moved their press car pick-up location from the professional service they had been using for years to a local dealer, the same folks neglected to tell me that Jaguar press cars were to be picked up at a different location than Land Rovers, on the other side of town.
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| With only 1,700 kilometers on the odometer, electrical problems shouldn't be part of the equation. (Photo: Shawn Pisio, Canadian Auto Press) |
Upon phoning the dealership on the Friday prior to my Monday pickup date, another thing happened similarly to the Land Rover experience; no one at the dealership had any idea about a press car program or who to talk to about it. Some time later a very courteous Jaguar receptionist found someone who knew about it and told me to have someone in my company come by and pick the car up on Monday. Great, we were getting somewhere.
When Monday came, Shawn and Alexandra (I was in Detroit driving Vipers, Ram SRT-10 pickups and other fun toys on Chrysler's test track, poor pitiful me) went down to pick up the Jag and, after waiting for hours, couldn't do so as it was suffering from a broken power seat switch. What does a person expect on a car that only has 1,700 kilometers on the odometer? Is the ghost of Lucas, the electronics company that gave the British brand a bad name for reliability in years past, still alive at Jaguar? The automaker's 25th finish out of 37 nameplates in J.D. Power and Associates' 2004 Vehicle Dependability Study (VDS) might suggest this.
