I have recently become the owner of this rather nice X type. It has done just over 90,000 Km (< 60,000 miles) and has been kept in excellent condition.

However, there is a problem.

Intermittently the car will hesitate, it does this under light throttle application at any speed. It sometime does it when moving away from stopped or sometimes under light acceleration at highway speed. Sometimes at a constant throttle the engine gets "fluffy", it surges and retards slightly.
At highway speeds the hesitation is quite brutal, really jolting the transmission. Sometimes the engine warning light come on and stays on for a while - maybe a couple of days, maybe a few minutes.

The dealer that sold me the car has said that the computer is saying that there is a fuel pressure problem. He has replaced firstly the fuel filter (very dirty) and, as that did not fix it, the fuel pump. Since then he has also cleaned up electrical connections throughout the fuel system. This seemed to work for a while, but the problem returned.

It is going back in a couple of days for more attention.

I have also noticed that the fuel gauge/ trip computer are telling lies. If I fill the tank (with the best available) and drive until the trip computer says that I have 20Km left and the fuel gauge is in the red sector, I can only fit 40 litres of fuel into what is supposed to be a 60 litre tank

Where are the other 20 litres of capacity?

I have read here that the tank is basically in two halves as the tail shaft divides it , and that there is a transfer pump to even out the levels in either side of the tank.

If this transfer pump had failed, could it cause this loss in capacity?
Could it cause the main pump to starve and cause the low pressure warnings?

I intend to run the tank down to indicated near empty tomorrow and then raise the LHS of the car to try and spill fuel from one side to the other. I am not quite sure what this excercise will accomplish but I somehow think it is worthwhile.


Any suggestions as to a fix or to help diagnose both problems will be very gratefully received.

 

When you first started talking about jerking and hesitation I thought vacuum leak. It happens on mine when it's cold out. To me, the fuel filter and fuel pump would be the main culprits of this problem. Before focusing on the transfer pump, I would first focus on cleaning out all the fuel lines because it sounds like this car has had some bad gas through it a few times (dirty fuel filter.) If the transfer pump fails, you would get the hesitation problem around the same tank volume denoted by your fuel gauge. To me, it seems like something is clogged, unless you get the problem at one specific tank volume.

 

So far the dealer has replaced the fuel filter, the fuel pump, the transfer pump and the control module. It has been in the workshop 10 of the last 20 days.
The problem is the same.

It seems to get worse as the amount of fuel left in the tank gets lower, although last time I filled it the fault (the hesitation ) occurred 4 times in quick succession , the engine fault light came on and the problem went away.
Since then it has travelled about 200km without a fault.

I can still only get 40 litres of fuel into the tank from and indicated near empty.

It is back to the dealer tomorrow and I have no idea what the next step will be.

 

sounds like the transfer pump needs to be repaired or you need to shove some pipe cleaners through your whole fuel system :P