My first Jaguar plus a short introduction and some questions

[XJR_Germany]

Hello to all of you,

for a few months now I have been the owner of a Jaguar XJR, built in December of 2003. Until now, I have been (and always will be) a BMW guy as I only have had BMW's before, more precisely 7 series BMW's. There are still two of these parked in my garage that are being driven only during the warmer periods of the year, but thanks to another road user I had to look for a new daily driver. As the market for my beloved 7 series E38 model is not very attractive at the moment and the successor E65 still hurts my eyes I had to look elsewhere. The classic Jaguar design from the early XJ models in the late 60's up to the X358 however always has been very appealing to me and the X350's aluminium bodywork helped the cause, too. Here in southern Germany where I live and where the car is running, a lot of thawing salt is brought out on the roads during winter which doesn't help keeping cars in mint condition, especially those from the 90's and back who are not known to be especially rustproof. Therefore I started reading and trawling trough the internet and I also talked to a guy from my "home forum" for those 7 series models who owns a X350 model. Originally I was looking for a 4.2l N/A model, but he said - to give the gist about it - forget the N/A model and buy a supercharged one! So I did in the end and I have to say, I'm pretty sure that it was the right choice . The previous owners of my car have invested quite impressive numbers of money in the car, for example two new dampers, a new Alpine amplifier, a full service for the ZF gearbox and a few other things along the way.

Although I'm no mechanic and therefore relying on a thrustworthy car workshop, all these years with the BMW's allowed me to collect a big amount of knowledge and equipment all around these cars. With the Jag on the other hand, I more or less started from scratch again, but I'm trying to read and learn something new every day. At least I got my hands on the full technical manual and I also have a working laptop fully equipped with the necessary interface, SDD/IDS and so on. Therefore, some basic infrastructure is available although I did not dare to use it until now to be honest, thanks to the knowledge about the damage you can cause by any wrongdoing in this matter. For my BMW's I have the comparable equipment at hand, too, but it took me a while to really using it way back when , so I'll be very careful with everything for the Jag also.

Since buying the car I have driven a few thousand kilometers already and all in all I'm very happy with it, be it the ride comfort, the quality of the dipped and high beam lights or the engine as the cherry on the cake. There were a few things I had to get used to but I think most of them were manageable. Nevertheless, some questions still remained after reading a lot on different websites and forums, especially this one, which I'd like to share with you here. In case it's necessary or requested to move them as separate topics in the fitting subforum, please tell me to. Please forgive me using metric numbers as I'm used to them.

The first question is about the fuel range. Following the user manual the XJR has a fuel capacity of 84,5l of petrol thanks to the dual fuel pumps. With my regular driving I get a fuel consumption of around 11l per 100km (approx. 25 - 26 mpg), therefore the fuel range should be at least 700km per tank. In reality the reserve light comes up at around 560 - 580 km on the trip counter and I have not had the courage to go beyond around 630 km. Having done that and expecting the tank to be more or less empty, I could not get more than close to 70 liters in which means that there should have been some 15 liters left . I already had a look on the bottom side of the car but the fuel tank was fully intact with no bumps in it, not even a scratch. Is there any explanation for this, be it the reserve light coming on so early although there are a lot of liters left in the tank or the tank being effectively empty but it can't be filled with more than 70 liters?

The second one is discussed in another topic (this one: viewtopic.php?f=334&t=12399&sid=db7df2b ... 5a73aa7418) which I'm already following. My wipers work fine if you have them on permanent wiping or if you grab the wiper control for a single sweep long enough until the wiper is coming down again. On interval wiping however they tend to stop somewhere along the way after a while of wiping faultlessly und when this problem occurs, single sweeps don't work anymore either except with the technique described before. I guess, following everything I have read before, it is the wiper motor who is causing the trouble, is it?

The third and last question is about the front heated seats. The heating doesn't work on either of the front seats, whereas on the back seats, both sides are working properly. On the fronts, the lights on the dashboard come an when the button is pushed and you can adjust the three levels until the lights go out again. Unfortunately, nothing happens in the seats though. I'm not using the seat heating anyway, but for my passengers I'd like to have them in proper condition. I have already read that there is a so called Front Electronic Module that (among other things) controls the heating elements in the front seats and that is likely to occassionally fail at least for the heated sets. For example the eletric adjustment of the front seats is working properly and I don't recall any other malfunctions controlled by the FEM either. Is there any other potential cause for the heated seats not working or is the FEM the target to look at first?

Thanks to anyone who got this far and who can forgive a non-native speaker some surely existing mistakes along the way. Thanks in advance also for all yours answers and a warm welcome to this forum!

Best regards, Patrick

[J44EAG]

Hello Patrick,

Welcome to the X350 Forum. Your English is very nearly perfect! All aspects of your questions and observations are fully understood. No problem.

The fuel tank is split into two parts which bridge over the propeller shaft. We call this a saddle tank arrangement, rather like the seat (saddle) on a horse. As you perhaps can now understand, the amount of fuel remaining in the tank is also split into two halves. So the fifteen litres of fuel is probably also split so seven point five litres of fuel will remain in each tank when the warning light comes on. This gives you a reasonable amount of kilometers/miles remaining which allows you to locate a fuel station without the worry of running out of fuel! In addition, we should all try not to drive our cars until the tank is empty for fear of picking up any water from the bottom of the tank or perhaps filter blocking contaminate matter. My own personal habit with my XJR, is to refuel as soon as the dash light illuminates thus avoiding any possibility of residual tank water or fuel tank contaminate being sucked into the fuel lines. Water contamination control is part of my own maintenance schedules. I add a bottle Dry Fuel additive once a year. The product is extensively used by the marine industry to control tank condensation issues. The product is designed to absorb small quantities of water into the fuel if present and allow that moisture content to be burnt off with the fuel without causing damage to either fuel system components or the engine itself. Most motoring sales outlets will have some of this chemical on their shelves. Highly recommended.

Having a manual and IDS/SDD equipment puts you in a very strong and enviable position for undertaking your own diagnosis and informed repairs. That equipment will also obviously allow diagnosis and fault code clearance. You can`t really do much damage by plugging it into the car and beginning your exploration by running a diagnosis and viewing what appears. As your knowledge builds, you will gradually gain the confidence to perhaps electronically raise or lower each suspension air spring or may be change perimeters with the telephone, voice activation or other items that you find as you use and begin to become more confident with the equipment. It all takes time and practice. Ideally, you might enlist the help of a local Jaguar technician and ask him to help you with learning of the system. Many of us on this Forum have our own rather more basic diagnostic tools such as the Foxwell units, the iCarsoft 930i or the very cheaply priced Android or iPhone compatible Torque Pro app and ELM327 bluetooth OBD tools. They have proved very useful.

As regards the windscreen wiper issue I have on my 2004 XJR, I am now waiting for a DHL parts delivery from our friends at Eurojag. The wiper motor unit and two relays are due to be with me later today. Hopefully over the next few days, I shall be able to start to repair the problem with wiper parking either by relay changing or replacement of the wiper mechanism. I shall post again on that "wiper" thread again with the results which I hope will be successful.

I understand the problem you have with the heated seats. I would have thought your IDS/SDD equipment might be able to itemise where the fault may be. Remember that the diagnosis "points" towards the general area of the fault. As a random example, diagnosis might say there is a fault with the cylinder head temperature sensor. When you come to investigate the sensor, you might just find the connector has fallen off or has a layer of corrosion present! I`ve not yet experienced seat heater failure on my car so cannot really offer any further informed advice. I will try to find out more about the system when I have a little more time available. I have a slight shortage of time presently as my Father is due home from hospital after an illness and my hands are likely to be rather full for a while with his immediate care needs.

Please have a good look at the many threads we have running in the X350 Forum sections. We have been building a sizable knowledge base for a number of years which offers a huge amount of practical experience together with illustrations of work carried out by members and indeed myself. I would also encourage you to view our past magazine archive which is also available on this site. Specific pages are given over to the X350 and the many articles detailing repair procedures relevant to the X350.

I hope this information is helpful to you.

Best wishes,

Mike

[XJR_Germany]

Hello Mike,

thanks for your kind reply and all the useful information.

The construction of the fuel tank seems to be very similar to what I'm used to thanks to my BMW's. Via their so called Check Control system you can even see the amounts of fuel in both halves of the tank but I don't know whether that's possible in the XJ or not, too. The reason for my question was that I regularly have tours with around 600 - 750 kilometers, e.g 300 km one way in the morning and another 300 km back home in the evening. With the current knowledge and experiences I haven't tried tours with a lot more than 600 km there and back without refueling somewhere along the way but I'd like to avoid the refueling along the way if possible. The deeper meaning of my question was therefore, why the dash light comes on already with some 15 liters still left in the tank or, in case that's not normal, what could be the cause of it coming on way too early? Apart from that, I will have a look at the Dry Fuel in any case, thanks!

I already ran a diagnostics run together with the previous owner of the car and that worked fine with no fault codes or other problems being displayed at the time. In the past few days I have looked around a bit, but perhaps not in the right places or with the wrong search terms as I was looking for an overview of changeable parameters like the ride height or telephone functions. Is there any to be known or does one just have to do some research for things coming to mind?

Firstly, all the best wishes for your father, may he get well soon! I've read the new posts in the other thread and I noticed the reference towards the FEM when referring to the parking position of the wipers. Thanks to the relatively cheap prices for used FEM's at EuroJag, I am going to ordner one in the next few days. Perhaps two birds can be killed with one FEM , if not, it's time to say goodbye to the wiper motor, I guess.

In the meantime I have found a lot of different, good information in the available subforums in the X350 part of the board. Tons of useful stuff, so much to read for so little time available...

Best regards, Patrick

[J44EAG]

Hello Patrick,

The fuel light coming on so early really does encourage the driver to refuel as quickly as possible to avoid the light distracting ones attention, but the main reason is to ensure you don`t run out of fuel or pick up any tank contaminate. My tank light illuminates when the tank level drops to exactly 30 miles of range remaining. I suppose that early warning is quite useful if you are traveling quickly on a motorway. Twenty or thirty minutes of remaining driving time is not that long really!

My wiper issue is still on going. The motor trade has closed down until the New Year so I just have to wait to get this problem fixed. With a damaged spine, I don`t want to have to work in the drivers footwell to release the brake servo so I`ll have to let Ray at Surrey Jag Centre feel the pain on 3rd January!

Stay in touch.

Mike

[XJR_Germany]

In the meantime, there were some developments, unfortunately mostly unwanted ones: last year, some idiot crashed into my XJR and totalled it in the process . Fittingly, the crash happened a few weeks after I spent around 3.000 € on some suspension works on the front end, so the only lasting experience with that will be that the new parts definitely helped the cause. The XJR accompanied me for about three quarters of a year and around 20.000 kilometres, but I liked every single one of them.

After the crash I got a company car which I'm also using as my daily driver now, but it (I'm hesitating to call this four-cylindered diesel with the emotional potential of a vacuum cleaner a "car") doesn't make my happy in the end. Therefore I already started to look for an alternative und with the XJR in mind, there isn't much more than another X350 on the list.

After all those journeys with the XJR, I had only one major aspect to critize and that was the ride quality on short bumps and bad roads in general. Because of that I'm now looking for a Super V8 model or should it be necessary a Daimler Super Eight. My research lead me to the knowledge that those two have a more comfortable suspension (except cars with the sport suspension option equipped) which instantly attracted my attention. Together with 18" wheels (the XJR had the standard 19" ones) I'm hoping for a better ride quality in the cases described before. Is that hope realistic or would it be better not to expect too much between both?

As far as I came with my researching another difference between the XJR and the Super V8 are the front seats. Those in the SV8 seem to be more comfortable and less "sporty", additionally they seem to have a 16 way adjustment instead of a 12 way adjustability like the XJR ones - however that difference may be usable in daily use. Is that gathering of knowledge correct and exhaustive or are there more differences to expect?

Regarding a Daimler Super Eight, are there any special parts differing from the regular XJR/SV8 models apart from the special front grille, rear boot lid handle and everything with a D or Daimler on it?

Thanks in advance again and I'm hoping to be among those fortunate people again soon who own and love a Jaguar.

[J44EAG]

The Super V8 is really an XJR with softer suspension and a higher level of internal luxury and electronic toys.

The best riding versions of all models tend to be those fitted with 19" wheel rims and comfort suspension. XJR type sport suspension is a little harder especially when combined with low profile rims and tyres. The XJR is better suited to the "push on" motorist in a bit of a hurry. Those not in a rush might find the XJR too harsh for quiet motoring. One has to decide when buying a X350, just what it is you aspire towards.

As regards seats, there are so many variations of trim between models and production years that it is difficult to be specific about any given car. Reference to sales literature of a specific period in the production run of the model would be the best way to ensure reliability of information.

The Daimler versions are very rare. Many of these cars would have been specifically specified by their first owner. As such, again there will be many differences in build specification, individual model to individual model. Only inspection of a particular vehicle will answer your question.

Mike

[XJR_Germany]

Thank you again Mike for your kind answer. I've read hours and hours of your postings on this forum and they gave me so much information as well as new leads to follow. Thank you for all this great work!

I liked the XJR as it was very much but on the other hand, it has to be the "green dot" version of the dampers in the car when I'll buy another X350. Despite other motorists crashing into me and totalling my cars I tend to keep them for long periods of time, therefore I want to get me the perfectly 'right one' this time. Thanks to your advice it will be a Super V8 then.

Thanks also for the information relating to the options and specifications. At the moment there is one specific Daimler model available in Germany that attracts my attention and I will ask the selling dealer about the information that (hopefully) comes with the car.