As a new member and owner of a 2013 XJ now I have read a whole lot of postings here that describe various issues with our cars. I find it very disturbing that a prestige auto maker would build a high end car with so many faults, so many real life failures in parts and such very confusing system diagnostics. It almost makes me feel like not taking the fine car out on the road and enjoying the drive for fear of it falling apart. I know that is a silly idea but look at the number of issues folks have and are having with these cars; really I must think that those fine educated engineers who design these cars must be hopped up on something that forces them to create nightmares for all of us by poor design and part selection & placement. Are we just too much in love with the JAG to realize it is a car only for a JAG Mechanic to own or someone who takes it to the dealer every 2 weeks for a checkup? Having second thoughts now on the choice made 2 week ago.........which is really sad, the car is really beautiful and runs like a champ...What say you?

 

Ken,

Don't buy a BMW if you're worried about reliability! I'd had my M3 for 4 days before #3 piston left the block and went for a wander around the engine bay...things got a lot worse from that point. BMW just recalled ALL the N20/26 engines for cam chain failures. Read the Audi forums and you'll shudder with fear.

Yes, I've had my water pump replaced (along with all the associated pipes). I've had the coolant tank and heated steering wheel replaced under warranty, and just recently the carbon canister. Not bad for a 9 year old car?

wombat

 

Looked at a 2014 BMW 740Li but the boss didn't want the repair costs and it was 3" too long for the garage. I just think that some of these high end manufactures think they can put in crappy parts and make us have them fix them at very high costs. We have a 2012 Infinity M37 that has had one problem, it threw a belt 2 years ago and I limped home, cost to repair under $125.00 total parts & labor. It does eat tires here in Texas about 20k miles on a set of new tires and we just had all the rotors and pads done, but it has 124k+ miles on it. Never had a water pump issue, or sun roof issue or any of the issues the JAGS seem to have....

 

Cars require maintenance and TLC. I'm a former engineer at one of the big 3. Trust me, the grass is the same color everywhere. The difference is, these volumes of cars sold do not lend themselves to common parts or cheap parts. There's nothing innately complex about these vehicles. Just laborious.

The good news is, most of the known issues have been posted here. The aluminum block is reliable. There are some engineered upgrades to the parts they were released with i.e. Water pump going strong on it's multeenth iteration, and cooling system maintenance. I'm planning on replacing the back half of my cooling system after having my water pump and front pipes replaced in 2018. It's a 9 year old car for me now, also. You'd be recommended to do similar maintenance on a Camry.

 

dmchao- I understand that it may be the same, but a simple reasoning on my part says why not make parts that last longer? Are we so greedy that we have to have things wear out sooner? I once owned a 1959 Hillman Minx, it had under 60HP in the small simple 4 cyl engine and got 35+ mpg and I could use regular and it was simple to work on (IF IT EVER FAILED) which it did not in the whole time I owned it for years and thousands of miles later. But that is just one example, and I am sure others have had the same thing with cars they have owned.....it seems to be to me at least a fault in either the engineering part or maybe the pressure of sales to bring product to market faster or some defective mfg process that creates these parts to fail so often.....I understand replacing a battery, tires, brakes and other items that have consistant wear on them, that is a given. But these other items like in your post above are just crazy and should last for a really long time given the number of hours driven on a car. .........

 

Well an Infinity is a dressed-up Nissan, which uses a continuous decades-old design with tweaks and updates, and is mass produced to the highest possible extent, whereas a JLR product is the result of an inconsistent lineage of parent company stewardship that have changed not only entire engine lines, but supply chains over the last couple decades. Much smaller population to improve on.
And where Nissan vehicles have much longer lives out of necessity of the owners, your JLR customer (first-owners) generally only owns it for a few years before looking to refresh to the latest model.

 

^ Right. Re: Part Longevity - I'm not sure what new standards exist within JLR, but they inherited and kept most of Ford's Engineering Operations and QMS systems when sold to Tata. Culturally, this means standards are tested to warranty timeframe + "some time".

Don't get me wrong, I believe robustness should have been better from the get go. It's obvious that they delayed retooling some parts due to financial impact, some of these tools are $25-40k on a complex molded part like the plastic cooling manifolds and they probably wanted to squeeze every drop from it's design while field failures were reported. This is probably a bit unfair of a guess, as the cost of retooling at a supplier has more benefits than it has negative outcomes, and should be a drop in the bucket.

The water pump, in my opinion, was the most severe of poor design outcomes. It's difficult to say without insider knowledge why JLR does what they did on the XJ. We know now they rapidly transitioned to sunsetting the marque as a result of I'm guessing sales and capacity. So, my uneducated guess is, they have legacy part/component designs they wish to handle delicately given the traditionally older/well off audience that these cars attract. Maybe I'm an exception, I bought mine at auction, and I'm now 28.

 

Hard to say but my 2014 XJR has been superb so far?
Water pump and front engine plastic pipes under warranty and an O2 sensor out of warranty but that's it so far. Now at 48K miles. Daily driver and have driven cross county too. But I have read all the big problems posted so they do happen.

I would just drive and enjoy your car.
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Best explanation thus far. However, Messrs. Dreger and Dmchao, these cars... all modern cars ... are infinitely more complex than those of the last decade, let alone the last century. Some of it is regulation, some of it is marketing, but the market for a Checker sedan is so small to be insignificant. At least in the USA. There is absolutely no need, for example, for the complexity and cost of GDI + turbocharging, except to offer the consumer stupendous hp/liter numbers while still delivering good (at least to the test) fuel mileage. Ditto 8,9,10-speed transmissions. If US consumers would be content with 200 hp, we could have normally-aspirated 6-cylinder multi-port engines with 5-speed transmissions that would run forever and deliver CAFE-compliant numbers.
As clubairth1 says, drive it and enjoy it.

 

Ken, to counter your argument, car manufacturers are in the business to make cars. But, if someone made a car that "never wore out", sure, the first 10 years or so of business is great. But after that, once everyone has one of your cars, there is no need to buy a new one. This lifespan is built into everything you buy these days. Why do you think TVs have a 3 year warrantee with them (the builder thinks after about 3.5 years, it is going to fail, making you want to buy a new TV). Now you mix in some "I gotta have the latest and greatest", those people are not really worried about what the car will be like at 5 years old. Why do you think there are so many lease units sitting on lots? They got the newness effect and now they are on to the next "great thing".

In going with what Balto said, there have been a lot of products created that could have raised MPG numbers sky high, but they have been bought and shelved in the name of money. I am waiting for the free valve technology to come out. I think that is going to be a game changer for engines. I just have to laugh at the manufacturers that are playing the electric car game saying "we will soon have zero emission cars". Yes, the car does not emit emissions, but what about that power plant 100 miles away, it doesn't magically create electricity (trust me, I work in one). Wind isn't the answer (seen the pits that they are burying all the blades in, yeah, that is good for the environment). Solar isn't it either (ever seen what it takes to make a solar panel? The amount of chemicals and earth that gets dug up is beyond belief). So yeah, "clean energy". People are just not looking deep enough into what they are wanting to understand the whole picture.