I'm not sure if it was the over enthusiastic use of the pressure washer or easing the nose of my XK into the garage door. 'Ease' I say, not crash or bump.
Anyway, the warning message plagued me for weeks while I tested its patience until it got seriously snarky and came on every time I started the car; now it was testing mine.
The obvious thing to do (according to my way of thinking) was to have it programmed out. After all, the cost of fixing it was not going to improve the performance or reliability of the car. I am at ease with the morals of this as no other car I have ever owned and I guess the vast majority on the road today, have not, or do not sport this sensor.
Equally I figured that there is no legal issue with it being switched off otherwise there would be a legal requirement for me to get it fixed. I was fairly sure that this is not something checked at MOT
and so, it was just a matter of finding a garage that could do this.At Service, my local main dealer advised that it could not be done. 'Well, they would say that wouldn't they' I thought. Their suggestion being that I pay them to fix it for £450. I contacted another local dealership and asked the same, they replied the same. I persisted, "are you saying you can't or won't, disable it" I asked. After a word with the service manager, the receptionist confirmed that it's not possible.
I simply couldn't believe that this was correct, surely it's just a matter of programming the engine management system to turn off this feature. I approached my local independent workshop. "Bring it down" they said, "if it can be done we'll do it but it'll cost you £50 to put the diagnostics on it". A couple of hours later they confirmed that they could find no way to do this. The up side was they didn't charge me.
Maybe I should have given up at this point, I'm not sure whether I was just not getting the answer that I needed or simple disbelief that it wasn't a configuration option. I contacted tech support at JEC. The morals and legals came up again and confirmation that IF it could be done, they weren't the place to do it.
You see, I was almost there, almost believing that it simply couldn't be done when the morals and legals got in the way again, I had to give it one more go. I tried another independent, they advised that they had replaced faulty sensors before but had no idea if you could switch it off. £50 to check though should sort it!
£50 out of pocket finally confirmed it could not be done, confirmed which sensor had failed and they replaced it.
If anyone has the facts behind the rational that required Jaguar to design this into the XK, I'd like to understand this.
Any Harry Potters out there that know a way to disable it, bring it on....I'm still not convinced.
