Jeep Renegade
Counting the cost of a bird strike
The other day I was driving along the A33 in the Renegade when a pheasant ran out of a roadside bush and into the road. I tried to dodge the bird but we collided. I pulled over to check for damage to the car, but there was nothing, not even a feather. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Then, as I turned the car back on, a heard a ‘bing’ and the warning light for the Forward Collision Warning (FCW) system came on. I dug through the handbook, which redirected me to the infotainment menu. After a deep dive of the vehicle settings, I discovered that I couldn’t turn the warning off.
So I rang a helpline that put me through to Italy, from where I was redirected to my local Jeep dealership, three miles away. They booked me in the following day to have the issue looked at.
After an inspection, the service assistant presented me with an estimate that amounted to almost £900. My jaw hit the floor.
I couldn’t believe how this had escalated so quickly from a warning light that seemingly needed just a software reset to actually needing a full day’s worth of labour and special parts that would have to be ordered from Italy.
Considering that, from the outside, there wasn’t a scratch in sight, I questioned what exactly the problem was. The service assistant told me that the sensor behind the plastic bumper had shattered and that the corresponding unit in the windscreen above the rearview mirror would also have to be replaced because they are apparently “calibrated together”, but the kicker is that Jeep currently has only one technician in the UK who can fix FCW systems.
The Jeep is fully driveable with the FCW system disabled, so long as you can ignore the chimes and warning messages every time you start up.
Technology such as FCW is obviously great for safety and Euro NCAP ratings, but I’m stunned that a fairly innocuous bird strike can inflict almost a grand’s worth of damage and require specialist calibration to remedy it.