About once a month when I start my car, the windshield wipers start sweeping even though the column switch is off. The wipers don’t respond to the switch. If I shut down the engine and restart the car, they remain off and operate normal. I mentioned this to the dealer when I had it in for service and he speculated it could be a weak battery that causes weird stuff to happen. My BatteryMinder thinks the battery is ok. Anyone have a similar experience and a fix?

 

Not on the XF, but on my old XJ8, the wiper will sometimes swipe just once across and back to the parked position upon engine start. More likely to happen in the summer months after I've left the car parked outside in the sun for hours with the windows up. If I leave the windows cracked open an inch and the sunroof tilted to let some of the heat escape, its unlikely to do it and since I almost always park indoors, it doesn't happen often. But I first noticed it well over a decade ago. At first I thought I was just accidentally bumping the stalk because of the proximity of the ignition switch on the column but no. Everybody was stumped. Doesn't seem to hurt anything and I just kind of learned to ignore it. Or if I've got a passenger in the car, I just tell them I bumped the wiper stalk rather than try to explain that its one of Jaguar's "quirks and features". Unfortunately, since the start button on the XF is in the center console, you can't tell the same lie. I park the XF and XJ8 in separate garages in case its catching.

 

Must be something in the rain sensor circuit. Can’t imagine the switch would fail in that manner. Thanks for the reply.

 

Has it ever had a new windscreen fitted?
i had a mondeo once which did similar things and before I got it, it had a new screen fitted. My problem was that the rain sensor was just rattling around in its holder. The fitters didn’t stick the sensor back. They are supposed to be stuck onto the screen with an optical gel. Once that was fixed, the wipers were fine
Worth a check?

 

Interesting. If the wiper switch is set to off it seems like the sensor shouldn’t be active. I doubt the windshield has been replaced. I bought it a year old with $17k miles. Worth checking into.

 

I also have a 2012 XF Base with the exact same wiper behavior that has been going on for years now. In that time I have learned two things that might help. First, I don't have to shut the engine off to kill the wipers. A quick press on the starter button stops the wipers in their tracks without shutting down the engine. I have gotten good at the timing and am able to stop the wipers at their rest position. Second, when I installed a new battery the problem stopped for maybe two months, then resumed. Battery is less than 12 months old and the wipers activate more than 50% of the time when car is first started and placed in gear.

No idea how to solve this other than buying a new battery every two months. But living with the "quirk" isn't so bad when you can just tap the starter button.

 

I've never had the wiper system apart on the XF so I don't know if this applies; on earler cars, inside the wiper motor assembly there are a couple of electrical contact tracks, one of which is the 'park' contact so that, when you switch the wipers off, they return to the parked position rather than just stop mid-stroke when you flick the switch. I'm wondering if you have a dirty or bad contact in there, so the wipers are behaving as if they had not yet returned to the parked position.
Given that it is the XF, there's probably some piece of computerised wizardry that performs this function that will cost several thousand dollars to replace, rather than a simple electrical contact.

 

Possible turn signal stalk problem. Not very expensive and might be worth a shot to swap out.

Also what does the battery read after the car has sat all night? We always have to ask that as it has solved so many problems in the past.
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Here’s a couple of observations from my 2012 XF. My AGM battery was 10 years old when I decided to replace it last month. Even after leaving a trickle charger on overnight, a battery test would show good, but that it needed to be recharged (12.4v or less). The wipers would most commonly spontaneously come on after startup following a long drive, which should have fully charged the battery. A year or so ago, the airbag light started coming on to accompany the wipers. Both would return to normal when I shut off and restarted the car. When my battery CCA dropped to 40%, even though it never had a starting problem, I decided to have the dealer replace the battery and properly recalibrate it. It was just under $600. So far the problem has not returned - fingers crossed. There’s lots of discussions here about the necessity of calibrating a new battery on a Jaguar using JLR software.

 

Just curious - did you replace the battery yourself or did you have the dealer do it and calibrate the new battery?

 

Here are the last 2 battery tests before I replaced my battery. The first restart after a long drive pretty much guarantees the wipers and airbag light comes on. So far so good after a new battery with dealer calibration.