I brought my car to my local mechanic for an oil change on Saturday. It was the first one I've had done since buying the car in May. It is just about to turn 50K miles so it seemed like a good starting point for what I hope will be steady series of oil changes every 7500 miles. I left the car with him since he didn't know how long it would be until he got to it, but agreed to call me when he had it up on the lift so I could take my first look at the underside.

About an hour later he called and I jogged right over to find that he had finished the job but the car was still up on the lift for me to take a look. The plastic panel under the engine/trans was still off (did you know that the bottom is covered, I didn't) so I could see the bottom of both engine and trans clearly. The first thing that struck me was that they were both very clean I suspect due to the close fitting cover that is tightly sealed along the underside of the radiator and that keeps road grime out pretty well. The oil pan drain plug was easily accessible as was the oil filter which mounts horizontally left to right in a recess on the driver's side of the oil pan.

The second thing I noticed was the exhaust system where there are two cat-converters on the down-pipes from each bank of the engine. They seem to be very accessible (unlike the one on the rear bank of my former X-Type...) with 4 O2 sensors sticking directly out, forward. The two pipes ran straight back on either side of the drive shaft to two resonators under the back seat and mufflers by the tail pipes. From where I was looking they seemed to be completely independent not sharing a converter or muffler. However, when I walked back I noticed a cross-over pipe linking the pipes just aft of the two resonator outlets. I knew there had to be one since modern exhaust systems are designed to deal with pressure pulses in the exhaust flow (what other reason is there for a cross-over?).

The third thing I noticed was the beautiful cast (forged?) control arms on the front suspension. They are very graceful. As is the cast bracket at the end of the transmission. That one particularly surprised me since you would think that a stamped metal piece would have been sufficient, but I guess not.

The rear differential, half shafts, hubs, etc. were pretty regular other than the differential being alloy and having very nice cooling fins (?) running fore/aft along the bottom.

Oh, one other thing that we noticed, was that the A/C charging connection is on the bottom and the car has to be raised and the bottom panel removed to recharge the system (at least that what it seemed since there was a connector there). My mechanic noted that it would have an A/C tech, not familiar with the car, guessing... The car also has to, pretty much, be on a lift to change the oil since the bottom cover would very difficult to remove/replace otherwise.

Anyway, I thought the bottom of our cars are very pretty.

Oh, the 4.2l takes 7 qts of oil and I always use Mobil 1.
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Jaguar - it's not an automobile, it's a Motorcar