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When I select sidelights they do not come on including the panel lights & ligt check alarm light. Select dipped or main beam they come on but still not side & panel lights.

However after variable time periods the bulb failure check alarm illuminates and the sidelights, front, back and panel come on and stay on for the duration of the journey.

Any ideas please

Sounds like 'Bulb failure module' Failure. Mine had similar symptoms a while back. IIRC around £15 for a new module from Manners.

It looks a bit like the voltage regulator fitted on the back of (proper) Mini instrument packs and can be found by dropping the passenger side fuse box cover.

Tel

Hi all

Just experienced a similar problem and found the cause.

Vehicle: U.K. spec 1995 XJS 6.0, dim dip system fitted.

Symptoms:

Driving on dipped beam all seems well except I noticed that instrument lights seemed dim. When I changed up to main beam, main beam came on but all instrumentation illumination went out! Changed back to dipped beam and instrumentation illumination came back (again dim) and dipped beam on. After about a minute or so instrumentation illumination came back to normal brightness and dipped / main beam functions operated as normal.

When I reached home and tried different permutations of light settings, i.e. ignition off, ignition on, engine off, engine on etc. the problem would sometimes be present, sometimes all was well. Don't you just hate that?

Anyway, one of the main problems, and it seemed the logical place to start, was that, with sidelights on and ignition off (i.e. no dim dip muddying the water) there were not any lights on outside at the vehicle at all although the 'lights on' warning chime would still sound with the driver's door open. With the ignition off there weren't any instrumentation lights showing but this would be expected.

Remedy:

This seemed to suggest a relay issue and investigation traced the fault to the sidelight relay on the left hand side of the engine bay (on my car the centre relay of the five blue relays in this location). Slight movement of the relay could cure the problem although it was purely hit and miss whether the lights would come on or stay on without a bit of a wiggle of the relay.

I replaced the relay with one of the others alongside it and sure enough everything worked without a problem. I therefore removed all of the relays in this location and cleaned all of the connectors etc. before replacing them in their original positions. The sidelights still operated intermittently. I removed the relay casing and replaced the relay without it's casing to observe it's operation which showed that it was in fact working mechanically but the contacts were corroded badly. These were cleaned up and everything now works as it should!

Jaguar (and other manufacturers) quite often get criticised for simple components not being repairable - credit here for the Hella relays which are easy to take apart and in this case fix!

Steve Cocks
X-Type Forum Co ordinator (off my territory here I know, hope it helps!)