Cyber attacks and the Great British Car Journey
Spare a thought for poor Jaguar Land Rover: as if the environment for British car makers was not hard enough. With Chinese cars of every shape pouring into the UK , Jaguar Land Rover have shut down all production due to a cyber- attack.
As one of the last of a generation of people who remember life BC (Before Computers) and also remember the massive hoo- hah about the year 2000, I am unable to conceive how this situation has arisen.
I have visions of an army of pallid, bleary-eyed techno-geek warriors madly typing on a vast battery of keyboards following instructions delivered into their ears by either some malevolent technocrat or the head of some diabolical regime.
Suddenly the infuriatingly erratic non-delivery of fuel by the SU Electric pump, the Lucas distributor which is failing to distribute or the spark plug which is not living up to its name seem like trivial , soluble problems.
The Year 2000 escapade was in retrospect a huge amount of very time -consuming fuss about very little as if the world might have ended in 1999? I sincerely hope the current Jaguar Land Rover business might prove similarly more apparent than real. Although it will take a government supplied loan of £1.5 billion to enable the restarting of production.
Great British Car Journey sends the Company a sincere get well soon message whilst we continue to celebrate the analogue age of flat batteries, weak sparks and recurring misfires.
On a more spiritual level , could it be that the late, great, Joseph Lucas rather bitterly known as the “Prince of Darkness” by a whole generation who cursed his products may be reeking his revenge from beyond the grave? After all, products bearing his name were fitted to generations of Jaguars and Land Rovers before contracts were lost and the Lucas name faded away. A cyber attack coming through the ether from an undetectable source might be the great man’s ultimate retribution.