Long-term report: Sat-nav adventures with the Jaguar E-Pace

It’s all too easy to make fun of drivers that follow their sat navs into the sea, or down an impossibly steep ditch, or through a branch of Dixons – until that is, it happens to you.

Let me set the scene: the E-Pace and I were making our way through Suffolk when Google Maps, plugged in via the Jag’s inbuilt CarPlay, chirped up with an alternative route.

For the most part it made sense: take a sensible-looking main road rather than sit on the A11 dual carriageway behind some sort of accident. Five miles later I was so chuffed with my progress, in fact, that I didn’t really question the sharp right-hand turn down a dusty-looking track. My destination was, after all, a house in the woods somewhere or other.

Fast forward 10 minutes, and after some even more questionably-surfaced roads, my luck ran out. ‘You have arrived’, said the chipper Google lady. Now at a dusty crossroads with miles of trees in every direction, I most definitely had not.

With the sun setting, the Jag and I were now in the middle of the vast Thetford Forest without so much as a bar of 3G, and no other humans in sight.

Having taken half a dozen turns down identical tracks with identical pine trees, there was little chance of tracing my way back out either. I started to wish that, like Hansel and Gretel, I’d dropped some breadcrumbs as I went along.

Eventually – thanks to the E-Pace’s built-in nav – things were looking up. I was heading down an actual mapped ‘road’ and the end was in sight. Until, almost inevitably, I reached a locked barrier.

There was no way around it: I’d have to try and find my original entrance again, and fast – it having occurred to me that I was probably now on some land I shouldn’t be on.

Thankfully, the Jag was just the tool for the job. I’m normally not an advocate for small SUVs, but at that moment, on the pitted and rutted tracks normally reserved for timber lorries and Forestry Commission 4x4s, I was very glad to have the E-Pace’s extra ground clearance over any of its saloon siblings.

Our car’s 197bhp and all-wheel-drive made light work of the slipperier bits too, and before too long I was making excellent progress. Passing piles of nearly-arranged timber every half a mile, it almost felt like a Welsh rally stage.

Did we make it out? Of course. But only after two more locked gates, and a helpfully-timed local with a key. The moral of the story is, don’t go off the beaten track. Unless, of course, you’re in an E-Pace…