2004 XJ8 battery died, recharged, the weird wiper behavior described below began. Investigated battery, only would charge to 10v (seemed to be internal problem, may have partially frozen). Replaced with new battery. The weird issues continued.

Car starts fine, but wipers (which are not turned on) move slowly across windshield when car starts to about 2-3PM position. Flick wiper control arm to activate wipers and car dies (car turns off, but power appears to be uninterrupted). Car can be re-started without issue.

Re-start car, don't touch wipers (!). Touch brake pedal, sometimes DSC/ABS/Air suspension faults briefly appear on dash but go off; other times I start the car and these faults don't appear. In cases where they do appear briefly and go off, if I touch the brake pedal again the faults do not reappear. Other times only the "Parking brake failure" warning appears and then stays.

In general, if I don't touch the wipers things seem relatively fine and the car seemingly runs properly.

Codes (I've tried several times capturing codes, clearing, re-capturing). The codes that are most persistent:
P1582, B1582,P1799

Lots of other codes appear during some iterations, but other times do not appear:
B1317, P1797, P1637, B1637, B1338, P1799

I have tried a hard reset but appears to have no effect.

Help!
Dale

 

 

To add a bit more detail. I took the car for a drive. At speed, the abs & dsc warning lights come on, when coasting up to a traffic light, or while sitting at a traffic light, those lights go off. When those lights are on, the wipers don't move (the wipers aren't on, they just move slowly on their own), but when those lights are out the wipers start to move slowly across the windshield. So it almost seems engine rpm related, perhaps in some way driven by the alternator output?

If the car is not running, I can run the wipers without issue. It is only when the car is running that when I run the wipers the engine cuts out.

All other electrical seems to work correctly.

Jim, do you think those symptoms would be caused by a faulty ground? I'll definitely check that, but I'm wondering if the FEM might need reset? Or, worse, replaced? I did see the "low brake fluid" fault come up once briefly, and that and the wipers are both related to the FEM. (But the DSC/ABS is not, so....)

Thanks,
Dale

 

 

Yes, faulty grounds can cause those and other electrical issues. I also had creeping wipers and various warning lights and all I had to do was tighten the grounding nuts* behind the headlights. All issues went away!

But be very carefull when doing so as the bolts/nuts are fragile aluminum.

 

Search the forum. Someone had the exact issue about a year ago. He finally chased it down to ground issue.He did a lot of troubleshooting be fore finding the cure. Search and you will save yourself a lot of work.

 

I believe this was it. You will see a lot was thought of by members, but in the end it was a ground.
https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...turned-141430/

 

+1 on earths (grounds)

 

I will be reviewing all the grounds and will report back once completed. Thanks to all for the inputs!

Dale

 

Does anyone have a diagram that describes where all the grounds are located? I want to make sure that I check them all.

Thanks,
Dale

 

Here's all of them

 

Hi Dale G,

I had a similar issue. I would activate the wipers and the car engine would stall. The wipers would also creep on their own and then I'd get lots of different warnings at completely random times.

I fixed mine by cleaning the ground points at the front of the car that sit behind the front headlights. As you look toward the front of the car, there are two behind the left headlight cluster and one behind the right headlight cluster.

When I cleaned mine, one snapped off when I unbolted it. It had corroded all the way through. I had to redrill a new mount.

I've had no problems since.

Thanks,

Chris

 

Most of the electrical problems on our cats: bad battery or bad earth!

 

Hi all,

Recently started getting random "Failed Front LH Indicator". It started to appear a while after cleaning my front ground points that were causing the car to stall when I activated the windscreen wipers. I thought it was just the bulb at first so just installed a new one. That didn't work. It would still randomly work and not work but appeared to be getting progressively worse/more frequent. Managed to take a look at it over the weekend and the ground looked ok. It looked clean from the previous cleaning I did a while ago. But I just decided not to bother cleaning it again and instead I just left the old ground point in place and installed a new one just next to it and moved over the electrical connections to it. The fault would show quite quickly into a journey but now I have not had the fault code since before I did the work over the weekend.

So in hindsight I would just install new ground points at the front and not bother to clean the existing ones.

Thanks,

Chris

 

hi
I had same issue with mine,turned out to be bad earth behind the headlights once cleaned not had a problem.

Thanks guys