New Member to the forum, enjoying my 2015 F- Type V8S

 

Welcome to the forum and F Type ownership

 

Welcome. Make sure you post some pictures if you have not already! Your going to love it.

 

Welcome to F-type ownership, you are now a proud owner of a still gorgeous but aging luxury car. In my experience all cars start having mechanical issues right around 8 year mark, so keep that in mind as you are moving forward. You will be maintaining a formerly $100K+ car and need to budget for that. As F-type shares a lot of mechanics with earlier Jaguar XKR, even early F-types benefit from 'mid cycle' mechanical updates and are considered reliable. As no car is perfect, there are few common themes and re-occurring flaws that you will have to deal with.

Issue 1: Cooling system and plastic coolant piping - unfortunately a number of plastic coolant pipes in the engine bay were made from material that becomes brittle with age. This was made worse by adding an insulated engine cover that traps heat. Some of these coolant pipes are in the engine valley, requiring removal of supercharger to replace. Parts were updated around 2017, but your early F-type does not have them installed from factory. These can fail two ways - sudden failure where you dump all coolant and overheat the engine or slow leak. Sudden coolant loss made more dangerous as in-dash engine temperature indicator displays a running average and not instant temperature measures. So by the time you see dash warning about overheating the engine have been cooking for a few minutes. Treat anything related to cooling system as an emergency, don't wait to pull over and shut the engine off and have the car towed. While this might be an overkill, I ask my garage to pressure test cooling system every year prior to storing it for the winter. I also permanently removed engine cover and it had measurable effect on reducing engine bay temperature.

Issue 2: Engine oil and sludge. AJ133 V8 engine in F-type uses direct injection (DI) and oil pressure to control variable timing. DI means these engines are prone to developing sludge on intake valves if oil is neglected. Fortunately, frequent oil changes using spec oil shown to largely mitigate this issue. It is very crucial that you stay on top of oil changes and use spec synthetic oil. Also keep in mind AJ133 V8 doesn't have low oil pressure sensor, this means you can run the car out of oil and it will not warn you. All of this means that you have to be religious about changing oil and monitoring engine oil level.

Issue 3: Injectors. AJ133 engine in F-type uses direct injection. This system has two stage pumps and high-pressure injectors. Injector failures are unfortunately known to happen where whole rail has to be replaced, but can be somewhat mitigated with regular use of PEA-containing injector cleaning. I recommend running PEA fuel additives like BG 44K annually.

Issue 4: Battery and charging. You have two batteries - start and stop and the main battery. The later models have only one battery. When you plug anything into OBD port, control module is known to get glitched and not completely power the car down. This in turn runs the main battery flat as it never fully shuts down. To fix this, you need to disconnect the main battery to reset the power control module. This is huge inconvenience, can lock you out of the car and so on. My suggestions: a) know emergency unlock procedure (with mechanical key hidden in the fob) b) avoid using OBD readers and so on. You can visually tell that the car did not fully power down if emergency triangle stays illuminated 10 minutes after you locked the car. More so, having marginal battery on these cars is known to trigger all kind of fault codes, so if you suddenly see multiple dash warnings about unrelated things... don't panic, it just might be a marginal battery.

While this is not a fault/issue, make sure to stay on top of transmission, differential, supercharger oil, brake fluids and engine coolant changes. Unless you have records from PO, assume that nothing other than oil changes was done (many people treat lease cars as a rental). This means you have to catch up on all fluid and filter changes. Especially important is transmission fluid and filter - these cars come equipped with a superb automatic transmission that I expect to last forever, that is unless you never change transmission fluid.

Also have to be mentioned. If your car is still on Pzero tires - these are the worst "performance" tires in the industry. Upgrade to MP4S and it will transform how your car handles.

 

Couple car pics
Look forward to many conversations about the F-Type. After Merceds, Porsche, Triumph, Austin Healy & Audi the Jaguar is so much fun with beautiful lines.

 

Nice! And welcome to the forum. So much good information here. Careful though, I thought I'd just leave it stock, but that thought faded quickly...