Hello all. Just picked up my 2005 XKR a couple days ago. Absolutely love it! One thing I noticed however, is that the driver's seat controls do not work. I can hear a motor making noise when I try to move one of the controls, but nothing happens. Also, the heated seat does not turn on on the driver's side either. What could this be? I saw a thread with a link to some fix regarding this, but it must have been a while ago because the link no longer works. Thank you for your input!

 

The issue is typically with the seat control module. It is a grey box located right under the very front edge of the bottom cushion. It can easily be removed (2x10mm nuts). The circuit board rubs against the hard plastic shell and the edge tracks eventually get broken. The repair involves soldering wires to replace the tracks on the board. When the module fails, there is typically no heat, and the light stays off.

If your passenger-side seat works, you can swap out driver/passenger modules and better determine which of the modules is faulty.

Obviously, check the fuses first before going in any deeper into this. They can be accessed when the driver or passenger doors are open.

If the noise is coming from the back of the seat, typically, it is a problem with the headrest cable. The sleeve the cable is in is too long (or cable too short) and the cable pops off the mechanism. There are several fixes for this as well.

There has also been a report of missing cables at the bottom of the seat, making the motor spin, but having no effect on seat motion. That may have been a one-off, though.

Best of luck, keep us posted.

 

Thank you! Will check this out in a little bit. Would happen to know where I could find anymore specifics about that repair?

 

Well, first order of business is probably to firm up the diagnostic, but, as a general statement, I get great results with Google site search. Try something like this in Google:

This way, you get results specific to our cars. As you should know by now, this site IS the technical manual for us...

More specifically, if you dig in the threads about the seat control module, a couple of names will pop up for folks that have offered a repair service for these modules. It requires fine soldering skills, but is otherwise normally not complicated. Best is to send it to a forum member so the module can be tested in a car before being sent back to you. If you have the said soldering skills, the job consists of locating the ends of each one of the tracks located near the edge of the circuit board, and replacing these tracks with a short section of wire.

The alternative is to find a replacement module, but I hear they are insanely expensive through the dealer (if available at all), and getting another module some other way (eBay, CL, etc), provided you get the part numbers exactly right, may require programming it into the main computer, i.e. more dollars.

For the headrest, the leather "skin" needs to be rolled up to reveal the motor and cable. The cable spins into a sleeve, and its square end fits into a matching bore at the headrest end. My understanding is that, depending on your perspective, either the sleeve is too long, or the cable too short, which makes the square end pop off the bore, and spin to no effect. As you understand by now, the fix is to either shorten the sleeve (i.e. cut a short section off somewhere in the middle), or have a speedo cable shop make you a longer cable. Again, there are full write-ups on these procedures on this site.

Best of luck, keep us posted.