Jaguar XF 2.7 | Shed of the Week
Diesel has skyrocketed in price - thank goodness the saloon it goes into won't have cost you much...
There was supposed to be a £1,750 FN2 Civic Type R on here today but some complete bounder spoiled that plan by buying it. Shed had a good think about something that might come as close as possible to the raw edginess of the Honda, and this is what he came up with: a diesel Jaguar. For an old geezer like him though, an XF is a sporty motor. The paint is British Racing Green and in somewhat better shape than the delacquered Milano red of that Honda. The wheels are unfeasibly large and the leather could do with a clean but with only 113,000 miles on the clock, a £1,599 price tag and a clean (albeit short) MOT, Shed has been experiencing a rare twitching in his trousers.
We have had a couple of XFs on here before, but they were both 3.0 V6 petrols. This one has the 2.7 twin-turbo V6 diesel which, for a certain type of owner, would be the preferred choice even with diesel prices now cresting the £2 a litre mark. If Shed could be bothered to work it out he would attempt to prove to you why, even with diesel costing 30p more a litre than petrol, it’s still his favoured option. Admittedly his diesel driving style is a bit unusual. It consists of chugging around in as high a gear as possible for 99 per cent of the time and spending the other 1 per cent mercilessly thramping up and down the dual carriageway next to the old folks’ home to clear it out.
In terms of real-world progress, there wouldn’t be much between the 205hp/321lb ft 2.7 diesel and the 235hp/216lb ft 3.0 petrol. The torque difference meant the diesel was actually quicker, with a 0-60mph time of 7.7 seconds against the petrol’s 7.9. Fuel consumption of 37mpg versus 26mpg meant you could go an extra 150 miles on a tankful of the black stuff. Jaguar put a lot of effort into quietening the diesel too, and its VED tax should be a relatively affordable £395 a year. Well, in Shed’s mind it should be £35 a year, but his mind isn’t all that closely connected with reality.
Being a pre-2015 example, our shed will be an X250 made of Ford steel rather than the aluminium they used for the X260. Being a pre-2011 example, it will be a non-facelift car. Being a 2008 example, it’s fair to call it an early XF, production not having started until the very end of 2007. Luxury was the lowest spec, although you couldn’t tell that from the outside because, barring wheel differences and a badge on the SV8, all XFs were deliberately designed to look the same. Great if you were buying a base model, not so much if you’d splashed out on an SV8. ’A customer is buying an XF rather than an XF in a particular trim level,’ sniffed Jaguar’s PR machine at the time.
A similar ethos applied to the cabin, where many features were designed to be ‘invisible until needed’. More visibly, the XF boot was class-leadingly large at up to 540 litres. The basic 8-speaker audio setup (as here) sounded decent enough with a high-mounted woofer and a tweeter in each door and DAB as standard. JaguarSense Proximity controls meant you didn’t have to touch the glovebox lid or overhead console lights to operate them, a nice biological bonus for a ten-owner car like this, assuming it’s all still working of course. There was also a Pedestrian Contact Sensing System. Shed is currently scouring the XF online manual to see if this system can somehow be modified to refuse entry to certain people whom he would prefer to categorise as permanent pedestrians rather than passengers. Somebody should tell him what PCSS actually means.
The MOT does only have three weeks left to run, but when the XF was tested last April they couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Consumables apart, the worst thing to befall it so far has been a small diff leak noticed in 2024 and apparently put right at the time, or some time near it at any rate as it didn’t reappear in the next test. Diffs on pre-’09 XFs did suffer from contamination of the ‘lifetime’ fluid, causing wobbly pinion gears and halfshafts and damaged seals. It’s very much worth checking that the rectification work for this has been carried out at some point or you might be in for a whole new unit as they’ve changed the design since.
The Ford/PSA 2.7 ‘Lion’ unit does come with issues, like um crank failure. If it’s any consolation, the 3.0 and 2.2 diesels also had potentially catastrophic faults, which was something nice to think about while you were waiting by the side of the road for the recovery truck.
XF reversing cameras failed. They weren’t standard and there’s no mention of it on the ad so you might be lucky in not having it. Rising gear selectors didn’t always rise, leaving the car stuck in Park. That could be something as simple as a weedy battery, but if it isn’t you’ll need a new selector and as you might guess that won’t be cheap. Clutches for the stepper motors driving the rotating air vents in the dash wear out. That used to be an expensive repair too, requiring completely new vent/motor assemblies. Nowadays clutches are available separately, reducing your initial outlay, but partial dash dismantlery will still be needed. Tyre pressure monitoring sensors were, and probably still are, notoriously fragile.
Shed’s diligent research suggests that those 20-inch wheels are off the SV8. In this application and scabby condition they look more like the wheels off Charlie’s chuck wagon out of Wagon Train after a particularly tough hike through Arizona. On the plus side, SV8 wheels do go for big money in some markets, like the US. They’re not easy to come by in the UK either. Shed could only find a single refurbed one, priced at £229. In the worst-case scenario, you could buy the Jag for £1,599 and flog the wheels. Grab a dozen bricks from the recycling centre and you can be enjoying a good chunk of the Jaguar experience with zero running costs.
The fact that the seller does not stick 12 months ticket on it is a bit eyebrow raising.
Still, for the money you can't go that far wrong if you're willing to play MOT shed roulette... potentially an epic shed, potentially a waste of £1600.
[Dirty Harry]Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?[/Dirty Harry]
I was working for Jaguar when these were released and remember driving a brand new one, still with bits of new car plastic attached, through Birmingham on trade plates. It caused a huge stir with traffic stopping to get a look at it.
At the factory Ian Callum showed us round one that was for display purposes as it was effectively cut in half to show the insides. He proudly described how they d tested that rising gear control by dropping a 2 litre bottle of coke down it to see if it would still work.
We had one guy come into the showroom when all the cars were still on order only and insist on buying the one in the showroom there and then with an enormous amount of cash he had. The company accountants were not too excited about that but the dealer principle did not pass up the opportunity for a sale!
And those wheels do looks comically large to the point where they’d affect the gearing.
I usually like big wheels as well, but they don't seem to suit this though as mentioned for me.
These cars never had a single case in the years I worked at Jaguar. Nor did the S Type 2.7 which preceeded it. The car which DID was the Land Rover Discovery. The use case of a stay-at-home Chelsea mum who drives a mile from home to school to Starbucks and back home again didn't allow the DPF regen to complete, and led to oil dilution. It was THIS that led to crank wear and because this patern went on uninterrupted for a few years eventually snapped.
The way it gets talked about, you'd think it was a fatal design flaw which threatens all of the Lion V6 engines. It doesn't. Its just people who should have bought petrol not knowing how to keep a diesel working well. Same goes for the 2.2, Ford built hundreds of thousands of them and fitted them in everything from the Mondeo to the Freelander 2, with the XF and Ranger in there too. Use it as a diesel and the crankshaft is fit for 300k miles.
Rant over. Buy an XF, they're flipping brilliant, my partner had one for a few years and adored it.
These cars never had a single case in the years I worked at Jaguar. Nor did the S Type 2.7 which preceeded it. The car which DID was the Land Rover Discovery. The use case of a stay-at-home Chelsea mum who drives a mile from home to school to Starbucks and back home again didn't allow the DPF regen to complete, and led to oil dilution. It was THIS that led to crank wear and because this patern went on uninterrupted for a few years eventually snapped.
The way it gets talked about, you'd think it was a fatal design flaw which threatens all of the Lion V6 engines. It doesn't. Its just people who should have bought petrol not knowing how to keep a diesel working well. Same goes for the 2.2, Ford built hundreds of thousands of them and fitted them in everything from the Mondeo to the Freelander 2, with the XF and Ranger in there too. Use it as a diesel and the crankshaft is fit for 300k miles.
Rant over. Buy an XF, they're flipping brilliant, my partner had one for a few years and adored it.
Electric for the runabout(or petrol if you prefer like I do), diesel for the distance car, and petrol for fun is arguably the ideal in my eyes for example.
I had a D3 with this engine and it was fine too. In fact, the only thing that went wrong in 5 years and 100k miles was an alternator. Awesome car, I loved it.
I had a D3 with this engine and it was fine too. In fact, the only thing that went wrong in 5 years and 100k miles was an alternator. Awesome car, I loved it.
Her's doesn't lock any more (she doesn't care, it's full of straw inside), the side steps have both fallen of, it does a strange 'shimmy' through the whole vehicle after each gear change, A/C obviously doesn't work but somehow it passes it MOT and keeps going. She loves it too.
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