I thought it was too good to be true...it's been at least six months since I last had to tackle a problem with the XKR, and that turned out to be a just be a bad wheel sensor....no, this one is unusually weird. The speedo keeps freezing up? It doesn't happen all the time but it can happen anywhere, anytime, any speed. The needle always stays in the 'frozen' position when the car is turned off. Sometimes it will reanimate immediately on the next restart but sometimes it will be several minutes driving after a restart a before it wakes up and sometimes it stays frozen until a second restart? I'm browsing through all the posts I could find related to instrument issues but haven't found anything relevant yet. Any suggestions from the Forum Sages would be most appreciated before I pull the cluster out and star poking around in ignorance.

 

My instrument cluster went out probably from jumping a dead battery. Got one off eBay for $30 from an XJ8 (LJE400AB). The message center did not work on that one. Bought another for $100 and worked fine (plug and play). Never drove with the $30 one so can't say for sure speedo is working. Everything else on it was working. No idea how hard it is to switch out just speedo, but you can have for the shipping. XJ8/XK8 instruments packs are different from XJR/XK8 instrument packs. I think tearly years are different from latter years. The mileage is stored in the instrument pack. Most on eBay list the mileage.

 

But, Officer, I was only doing 25 miles an hour...

 

I would take the instrument cluster apart and see if you can get to the speedo motor or the needle. You can probably fix this just by exercising that needle back and for a few (hundred) times, maybe even spray some contact cleaner into the spindle, then finally push the needle back to the zero position. This is a good video showing how to take the instrument cluster apart - unfortunately it doesn't show how to get to the needles, but it's a good starting point:-


I would be surprised if you can't fix this with cleaning and exercise.

 

On my fried instrument panel I was doing 130 mph in the garage while idling and the odometer was going up at the rate of 60,000 mph.