My '14 started leaking this year, after 10 years. Replaced with aluminum and no problems. Not very high mileage so must have been years.

 

I want to thank everyone for your responses, comments, opinions and experiences. I started this post with hopes of knowing the risk (percentage) these plastic pipes pose. I was surprised the UK forum has very few posts on this topic and interesting comments for anyone interested. IMHO there is not enough information from both US and UK forums that suggests that these plastic parts will fail sooner or later. I’m convinced that the risk of failure is a very small percentage of total motors manufactured. Cheers Frank

 

What set of aluminum pipes seems to be the best ?
thank yoi

 

We live in Texas and are members of our local Jag club. Of the 4 late model Jags we've owned, the two V8S (14 V8S and 11 XF) both suffered cooling pipe leaks at under 50000 miles that were repaired under warranty. Neither were catastrophic. I recently bought a16 F-Type S manual that appeared to be all original. With nearly 60k miles on the clock, and because it is going to be tracked hard and often, I replaced the cooling system components with metal or new parts, including the water pump, and also rebuilt the supercharger. A sudden failure on the track at full throttle would likely cause damage, but at the very least make me unpopular with the organizers and other participants due to the clean up delay.

It is common to hear amongst club members of coolant pipe failures, and some have been sudden total coolant loss even in cars that haven't been driven hard or often. I'm not sure if this is the norm elsewhere, but my perception is that V6 models seem to be more prone to total loss failures than the V8 engines cars? It may be that the hot climate in Texas is a factor here, or perhaps even the extremes of climate as we do freezes most years in north Texas?

 

The 3.0 and 5.0 SC engines use the same front pipes (but the rear manifold unit has longer attachment pipes for the 5.0); I doubt that the failure statistics would show any significant difference between engines.

And plastic pipe failures are not a “Jaguar thing”. Plastic pipes (with attendant failures) are common to other marques as well.