Hi there


My 98 XKR has various intermittent electrical faults, and when I try and tackle each one, I generally find nothing obviously wrong. Was wondering if you guys could spot a common cause, like they all come from the same fuse box, or go through the same part of the car or something. I'm suspecting some water is causing it - it seems to be more common on wet days, but can't swear to that.


Faults so far:
- Some backlights lights on centre console disappear occasionally (front defrost/heaters)
- drivers side door mirror powerfolds back too far.
- Central locking very intermittent - usually the alarm will go off when I lock it; sometimes it will work perfectly for a couple days.
- passenger (and sometimes driver) electric window does not return to position after door is opened...
- boot lights very intermittent - seems if boot has been open a while, they may eventually come on...


Any thoughts? Or just an old car with a lot of separate minor issues?

 

These cars are known to be finicky to low battery voltage. Ensure you have a good fully charged battery. Also you might want to check grounding cables, do a search I think a thread has the locations, there's actually several but your problems all seem to deal with the chassis

 

ditto on checking the battery

 

Out of curiosity, is it advisable to do a hard reset (=reboot) on these cars in an attempt to exorcise electrical gremlins? Is the only downside of doing this that you have to reset the windows and re-input the radio code/settings?

 

Worth a try if desperate and yes.

 

If the windows are not coming all the way up, they need a reset anyway, so a hard reset may be worth a try.

If you aren't familiar with the window reset procedure, you need to hold the window switch until the window is all the way down. Keep holding it for a little bit longer until you hear a faint, almost inaudible, click. Then raise the window, and keep holding until you get another faint click. Do this for each window.

 

All your problems are stemming from a common ground strap notorious for nightmares like this. Its located under the car,passenger side, transmission bell housing bolt to chassis.It will be fried green and needs to be replaced.


Get this, the engineer made the bolt length so long, that the bolt will not come all the way out and hit the firewall,resulting in you not being able to use an oem version strap, without major labor removing the gearbox,now why would they do such a thing?

So what I tell members is to simply make your own with a slotted tip for the tranny bolt, and regular circular end for the chassis or cut that bolt off, use a shorter bolt and oem ground strap.

 

I just cleaned up that ground strap. Mine didn't look so bad. What really chased away my gremlins was cleaning and and tightening my battery terminals (of all things). Of course, my battery was only a couple of years old, otherwise the battery itself might have been suspect.

I can't believe how sensitive the car is to electrons. My transmission was even giving me some weirdness.

Good luck!