The X350 has tip-tronic? It has a manual shift mode that I find almost completely and utterly useless. It won't hold a gear to save your life! Always downshifting. Pretty much all it does is limit the highest gear, and is really only useful for going down long grades where you don't want to burn out the brakes.

 

I agree, Alan. Perhaps the poster has been loaned an XF with paddle shifters?

I love them on the XK, and they do hold their gears, even past redline!

 

What is a " 2006 jag xj sc" ?

The manual option is crap on the J gate.
What have you been driving?
Up **** creek without a paddle Rick ?

 

"sc" = supercharged, I have a super v8.
I have found the paddle shiifters annoying.
but what I am revering to is the knob gear selector that the new jags have. the pop-up one vs the j-gate. it is a personal preference.
as for the manual gear selector like it beter than the up or downshift
action from many of the trip-tronics out there.

 

The newer pop-up style is cool I guess, kinda gimmikie. I'm used to just resting my hand on the shifter and in the XK, elbow right on the padded console, hand resting comfortably on the short shifter, all is right with the world. As for the paddles, they don't get in my way, I do use them from time to time.

 

J-Gate is fantastic, I don't know why you guys hate it so much but for me it's better than paddle shifters, and it wont shift even if you redline it, however like any other luxury car it won't let you take off at 5th gear

 

How could it be better than paddle shifters? It doesn't hold gears. Meaning if I am at 25 mph and the shifter is in 4th gear, and then I floor it, it will do a normal downshift into a lower gear. What it should do is just hold it in fourth and let me floor it (if that's what I told it to do), or at least have a much higher tolerance for "lugging" the engine. Also, the way it is setup is such that the manual gear selections are not gated. Unless you are really feeling very carefully and/or are looking down at the gear selector, you won't easily know what selection you've made.

I would've loved it if it were one of those "+/-" gear selection doo-hickeys. But it's not.

 

The trouble with the J-gate is it was invented when the gearboxes were 4-speed, and as the boxes today have so many more gears the intervals between each one have got shorter and shorter over the years, and the latest boxes with seven ratios make it almost impossible to put on the gate.
My car has six ratios, 5-2 on the J-gate, and I practised using the manual option in Germany over my 10 days on holiday, over some of the twisty roads in the Taunus hills. These have sharp bends about every 100 yards, hairpins even, and are very difficult for the Drive option to handle, it is trying too hard to select the right gear with the throttle being on-off most of the time, so it is best to swap manually.

The real problem I found is there is no indicator on the instrument panel. This really is a big ****-up by Jaguar as my previous car, a Rover 75 with a Jatco box had this and it is really useful. My wife's New Beetle also has it, although the manual option is impossible on this car due to the awful gear lever.

On the kind of roads in the Taunus, you don't want to be taking your eyes off the road for a second, or you'll go down the mountainside.

 

I really don't think indicator is a must have, i guess I'm just used to it, also amc you are right it won't let you stay in 4th gear if you are doing 10mph, it's a safety feature, first it doesn't want car to stall second what if you have to floor it in case of an emergency? FYI my Lexus Is350 with paddle shifters wouldn't let me stay at 4th gear too, it downshifts regardless, however my neighbor's SLR does not shift unless you use the gear selector or paddle shifters