Jay Leno’s Garage Drives To The Arctic Circle: Video

Writing about cars will never make you rich, but the job does have its perks. Chief among these are press trips, where manufacturers put you up in hotels you couldn’t possibly afford otherwise, feed you meals that cost more than your monthly food budget and toss you the keys to cars that are worth (in some cases, anyway) more than your first house. Sometimes, they even take you to racetracks, with the sole instruction being “please don’t stack our car.”

Not all press trips are filled with warmth and sunshine, as Jeremy Hart, covering the new all-wheel drive Jaguar XJ sedan for Jay Leno’s Garage, quickly discovers. Instead, this press trip covers a thousand miles of driving in the Yukon, demonstrating the prowess of Jaguar’s “instinctive” all-wheel drive. The goal is to chase the sun until it disappears under the horizon, or as Hart explains, going about as “far north in North America” as an automobile can go.

How cold are the temperatures? Try -50℉, which is cold enough to freeze the Yukon River solid. Breaking down here is a dance with death, and Hart gets some handy advice from the local police on how to build a life-saving fire using the car’s spare tire. That’s not instruction you’re likely to get from the Florida Highway Patrol.

If you’re going to drive a thousand miles to the Arctic Circle in winter, we suppose there are worse vehicles to choose than the AWD Jaguar XJ sedan. We’re not averse to cold weather, but to be honest, that’s one press trip invite we’re glad we didn’t get.