I don’t know if the Jaguar I Pace was deserving of winning the 2019 UK Car of The Year Award at all. After all who am I to say what car wins this award or that award? I am not qualified to say if the Jaguar I Pace is deserving of such an accolade because I have never driven it. But I do have a problem with awards. Always have, be it the Oscars, toilet cleaner of the year award, any and every award I have a problem with.
You see awards are nothing more than marketing exercises, I would even go as
And then there may be bias involved. Jaguar recently posted pretty bad sales figures. Another bad showing could kill off the company. Brexit or no Brexit. The real question is, is this UKCOTY positive coverage for a struggling BRITISH! brand?
Is the UKCOTY award handed out to the I Pace a form of patriotism. A British judging panel handing out an award to a British car company can seem rather patriotic. To the outside world maybe yes, but in a un-questioning media bubble where group think clouds normal common sense it does smack of self important indulgence.
Perhaps it’s a way for the British motoring press to give back for all the alcohol they drank at Jaguar press launches. And free booze lubricates the mind and is everyone’s best friend, right? Perhaps this award is a way to give back, to prop up Jaguar as it staggers around dazed and confused.
The Jaguar I Pace starts at £64,000 retail. That’s out of the price range for many people. Surely a car of the year should be awarded to a vehicle that is affordable to a large section of the car buying public. To make it more relatable to the public and not just a few chummy motoring buddies.
The UK Car of The Year Award was judged by a panel of UK motoring journalists (obviously), the best and most respected in the business. But we have a problem with that in and on itself.
Why?
Because only two female motoring journalists were on the judging panel a massive and embarrassing under-representation of women.
And it mirrors the automotive industry itself, specifically in PR. The women are in the background doing all the hard work while a few men take the top jobs and back-slap and haw-haw and hee-hee with the motoring press who take no interest with this in your face discrimination presumably because they live in their own media bubble. But they (men) do hand out awards to women for being women.
That’s progress and tokenism wrapped up in hypocrisy and delivered with no sense of irony at all.
Back to this award. In such circumstances who is going to have the dominant opinion? The respected Anglo-Saxon, middle-aging men of course. But where is the younger perspective?
English men (and two women) awarding a British car brand with the UK Car of The Year Award. You work out the math who has the dominant opinion.
And you know what the old British buyers think of Jaguar today? It’s too Indian. Racist basterds.
And to prove what massive hypocrites we are, we’re going to have to employ more female motoring journalists.
So did the Jaguar I Pace deserve to win the UK Car of The Year award? Or was it a sympathy award? We’ll let you be the judge of that.
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