We feel badly arguing with Car and Driver. After all, they placed the 2016 Jaguar XE, 2016 Jaguar XF and 2016 Jaguar F-TYPE R among their Editor’s Choice picks for Entry-Luxury, Mid-Size Luxury, and Premium Sports Cars. But sometimes, we think they miss the mark — or the forest for the trees — like they did with a recent piece by writer Ezra Dyer, titled Infotainment Overkill: Do We Really Need This Many Features in Our New Cars?
Infotainment, a newish word that combines information with entertainment and refers to hardware that brings high tech inside your vehicle. Dyer’s contention is that the infotainment features found in many manufacturers’ vehicles these days detracts from the driving experience. The car has a radio and he’s already got a smart phone, he says, and would keep a laptop in the car if he felt that he needed something more.
If we may, we’d like to disagree with Mr. Dyer for a few reasons. Not least of these is, if you’ve ever driven a Jaguar, you know that their vehicles, whether you’re talking about the 2016 Jaguar F-TYPE or the 2016 Jaguar XJ, put the driver and the driving experience front and center. While Jaguar has two infotainment systems (InControl and InControl Plus), they’re designed to augment the driving experience rather than detracting from it. Jaguar infotainment allows drivers to make and receive calls, access media, navigate, control climate, and control key driver settings, all without taking attention from the road where it belongs.
We understand concerns over distracted driving. To our minds, however, a good infotainment system — and InTouch is quite good, proving to be as elegant and effective as the vehicle that houses it — can be an enormous help in that regard. Rather than having your hands and eyes distracted by your personal devices, InControl is designed to be as much a part of the background of your drive as your leather seats: there when you need it, but never occupying center stage. And that’s as it should be.
At the end of the day, there’s really only one way to figure out if an infotainment system is right for you, and that’s to try it. With that in mind, come to Jaguar of Peabody at 247 Newbury Street, get behind the wheel of the InControl-equipped 2016 Jaguar XF, or the InControl Plus-equipped 2016 Jaguar F-TYPE, and find out for yourself. We’ll be here for your questions, whether they’re about infotainment, option packages, or financing, the same as we’ve been for decades.
