Hello!

I have a black 2001 Jaguar XKR Convertible. It's been a long time since I've posted, which is only a testament to how well she's held up in the past couple of years

I live in Minneapolis, and my brother was kind enough to let me store it in his garage in Madison for the winter. He started it once a couple months into the season and it started up just fine. Unfortunately after a couple months of sitting idle it did not start. I had a trickle charger in the trunk and just asked him to plug it in for a few days and try again. 5 days past and it still didn't work, so he jumped it. He said that he jumped it without a ground (he couldn't find one in the trunk and never heard of any problems with this method). Now I just need to figure out how to fix it - or if it can be fixed- before I make the 4 hour drive down there. I will go down on a saturday night and leave sunday, so the hope is it's not something that will require a mechanic.

Once it started the following problems happened:

1. He could not shift out of park with the pedal brake engaged
2. The following warning messages appeared, none of which were present when I stored it last November
   1. ASC Not Available
   2. Handbrake On
   3. Low Brake Fluid
   4. Incorrect Part Fitted

Here are our attempts at trying to fix:

1. Left trickle charge on for another 48 hours. The indicator on the charger was still red and the problems persisted
2. Checked all of the fuses in the interior of the car. The one I was really hoping was blown was #16 on the interior driver's side: J-Gate switch and Transmission Mode Switch. all fuses were fine.
3. Disconnected negative & positive, connected and turned the key to 'on', waited 30 minutes. the set-up looked like it should work but he checked the radio presets they were still programmed. Does that mean it wasn't successful?

Late last night he removed the screw from the J-Gate to manually shift the car which worked. He drove it to the gas station to refill. More issues:

1. None of the dashboard indicators worked
2. because he's not used to the car he couldn't tell if it was in limp mode
3. all of the previous hazard lights were present

the handbrake and brakes seemed to work fine.

Any ideas on what to do? to me this seems like an electrical problem but I'm really not sure. It would suck to get a ride down there and come back empty handed. My plan was to go down on 4/13 and return 4/14.

Thank you all!

Steve

 

I'm no expert here, and I'm sure someone more knowledgeable will chime in and correct me (I hope), but I'm thinking maybe

- perhaps the battery is just toast at this point?
- ABS control module got corroded or something--I had to have mine rebuilt I while back after Stability Control and ABS fault codes
- maybe a critter got in there and chewed up some wires, maybe connected to the ABS control module

 

I'd start with the battery.
A bad battery can cause some strange and seemingly unrelated issues, especially on these cars.
Replace the battery with a new one and see how many problems go away.

 

Should the radio presets still be programmed if I hard-reset the car?I just want to make sure it worked..

 

That's certainly true for the HK unit in my car. I can't see why the Alpine would be different.

Good luck: hope it turns out to be the simple dud battery fix.

 

I agree with all the above. Battery is the most likely culprit. You can have all sorts of weird and wonderful symptoms if its on its way out.

 

+1 on battery replacement.

This is the battery I put in my 04 XK8 5 1/2 years ago. Still going strong after 60K miles. Autozone AGM Order it on their website for local pickup and you can get 20% off.

 

+1 to all of the above. Evidence seems to point to the battery as the fact is you had a trickle charger on for 5 days and it still wouldn't start. The Battery change easy for your brother to do and hopefully will remedy your situation.

However there are some stories of modules being affected if someone jump starts the car wrong. Seems that the radio is the first to go in these cases. I'm a bit concerned that your brother didn't know where a ground/earth was when he jumped it.

Priority now is to get the car home, and your brother will have spotted the Lime Home mode for sure when he took it to gas station. So it should be okay.

 

Agree on the battery, get a new one installed and do another hard reset.

 

Can you explain what you mean by that? It sounds like he only attached the positive lead?