Hi

I recently purchased a second hand Jaguar x type sport 3 litre, it is an absolutely beautiful drive, the only problem
is that the engine temperature gauge does not work properly, it just seems to spin around and then it points wherever it wants, including straight down and at the red hot area, however the warning light does not come on and the engine when the bonnet is opened does not feel that hot. I have tried to change the temperature sensor but that has not made a difference. Anyone know what this problem may be and how I can fix it? I have previously owned a car that had no temperature gauge and I ended up having serious problems because of the engine getting too hot, therefore I am somewhat worried about driving to far in this one in case I end up with problems, so I really want to get it fixed so I can fully enjoy the car!


cheers.

 

Sean,
What you are describing is a loose needle on the stepper motor shaft in the instrument cluster.
If you are handy you need to remove the instrument cluster from the dash and disassemble the casing to access the needle.


I wonder if a previous owner has taken the cluster apart for some reason ?
It is quite unusual for the needles to become loose.


Paul.

 

Sean, soemthing you can try is to connect a 100 ohm resistor in place of the coolant temp sensor. This should cause the car to see a temperature around 210F from what I can tell. This should cause your fans to come on when the key is turned on. You can run the engine this way for a few minutes, especially from cold to normal operating temp. If your temp gauge needle jumps around with the resistor installed, you have a bad wire somewhere in the engine bay most likely. If you take your hand and hit the top of the dash above the instrument cluster and this causes the temp gauge to bounce, then you have a bad instrument cluster most likely or a broken solder joint in the instrument cluster plug area.

The other check that you can try doing is get into the car and depress the TRIP button and hold it down. Using your other hand, insert the key and turn it to the RUN position with the TRIP button being depressed. After about 3 seconds, you should see your information screen (bottom center of your instrument cluster) say "Engineering TEST". When you see this, release the TRIP button. Now, give the TRIP button one quick press. Watch the temp gauge and make sure that it sweeps all the way from C to H and back in the nice, smooth motion. If it does something else, either your needle is loose or the drive motor is dead/dying. To get out of this mode, you can either simply turn the key back to OFF or depress the TRIP button for more than 3 seconds.

Let us know what you find with either of these tests and hopefully this will give us something to go off of.