Maybe You Don't Want That Euro Diesel Wagon After All

Since editor Ed and big Bertel are in transit to Nashville right now, where they will be meeing me and my girls (Vodka McBigbra and Drama McHourglass) for dinner, there’s theoretically no way they could stop me from headlining this article Jalopnik-style, “THIS is the wagon that could kill you to DEATH.” Let’s just pretend I did. Because this really IS the wagon that could kill you to death.

Luckily, you can’t buy it in the United States.

ComputerWorld brings us the news that about 18,000 Jaguars were shipped with defective cruise-control programming. All of the affected cars were diesel X-Type wagons. That right there brings up the question: How the hell did Jaguar sell 18,000 diesel X-Type wagons?

If the fault occurs, cruise control can only be disabled by turning of the ignition while driving – which would mean a loss of some control and in many cars also disables power steering. Braking or pressing the cancel button will not work.

That’s like whoa. During my time as a car salesman in the Nineties, I remember dozens of customers expressing concern to me that “electronical cruise controls” would go out of control and shoot them down the freeway like rodeo riders on a particularly discontented bull. I patiently explained to them that under no circumstances would a major manufacturer permit such a situation to occur. Just for record, I never promised them that the cruise control stalk wouldn’t catch fire. That would have been rash. I just promised that it wouldn’t disregard the brake or “off” switch. Turns out it took Jaguar engineering to make my customers’ nightmares come true.

The fix Jaguar is offering, if I understand correctly, will disable the cruise control and warn the driver if certain conditions are met. Good idea. That’s much better than, you know, actually keeping the problem from occurring. In the meantime, those of you who are pining away for European diesel wagons can thank you stars that, although Jaguar wasn’t smart enough to engineer a cruise-control system, at least they were smart enough to avoid brining that car to the United States…