I'm looking at purchasing a used XK8 and have been evaluating a few. One has this label (he sent me an image) and the owner considers this to be an engine possibly replaced fairly recently. No records on it are available from him. I'm guessing it could be almost as old as the car or 1999. Should I consider this a great advantage and would it even be possible to find out more about when this was put into the car besides using the production date stamp? Btw, I haven't gotten the engine production date yet. I called a few dealers about this tag. They said it wasn't possible to get info through them and the car had not been in their service recently. I'm going to start pulling carfax histories and then may call dealers in those areas if outside of here in New Mexico. Thanks for any help you can give to an inexperienced jag buyer!

 

If the engine was replaced under warranty any dealer should be able to retrieve the warranty records from the Jaguar data base. There were a lot of engines replaced in the '98 - '00 time frame due to cam chain issues and Nikasil. If it was done at owner's expense you are not likely to find any records of it. Those repairs were local to the dealer and most, if not all, have changed their computer systems at least once since 15 years ago.

A new factory engine from that period started out with plastic tensioners so you have that issue still to resolve.

 

Is there a service booklet with the car - my engine was replaced because of the "Nikasil" issue and I also have a plate like yours :





However, in the service booklet it also says :


"Engine replaced 04/01/02 at 64,154 miles under service action S491."
I did try to get more information from the dealership that replaced the engine, but was told that they only had the same records, and that there wasn't really any more to know anyway !!

In my view, it's good news, my car has done 120k miles, but my engine has only done around half of that !!

 

Thanks, as far as I know there are no records, but it's possible the owner hasn't checked the manual. There are always surprises in old cars and hopefully we all have more good than bad. There's an independent shop that is supposed to be familiar with the car and I've got a call into them. If they are friendly and the seller negotiable, I'll have them do a deep inspection. All the cars I've been looking at have trouble codes floating around. This one has one going right now and another I saw just got one. Reminds me of the '01 Olds Aurora we had for over 10 yrs. The composite intake leaked every so often throwing codes. That was a 4.0 V8 too, but quite different of course.