No, but might discourage them if they don't have a screw driver handy. At the very least you would know that they did gain access to the gas tank before you drive off and ruin your fuel system or worse, the engine. With a torn up access door you'd have insurance coverage. Otherwise, proving vandalism as the cause of mechanical failure would be a huge challenge. The best of all worlds would be a fuel door integrated into the alarm system. I doubt that's the case with the F-Type.

 

I'll offer a slightly different perspective. As an owner of a 2010 XF, I spent a lot of time lurking on the XF forum as well as this forum both before and now after my acquisition of an F-type. It doesn't take a lot of searching on that forum to find threads complaining about the locked fuel filler lid. On all implementations that Jaguar has of the locking fuel flap (and I suspect other makers as well), the solenoid is in its locked position in the un-energized state. Therefor, any electrical fault along the way can easily lead to a situation in which the flap is locked and cannot be unlocked. This is the state that leads to the many complaint threads on the XF forum.

I suspect that Jaguar took this into consideration when deciding not to add it to the F-type. They were in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, opening themselves up to lawsuits in either direction. I'd hazard a guess that they've already found themselves the defendants in some lawsuits where people have been unable to re-fuel their cars and missed "critical" business meetings.

As to why they offer it to the ROW, I suspect it has to do with a combination of higher fuel costs elsewhere and a less litigious culture as well. We do love to sue people for our problems in the U.S.

 

OK, getting a little circular here. Yes, I completely understand your fears, but just don't share them. It's not on my list of top 1000 things I'm concerned about, which I why I couldn't understand why so many were all spooled up over this.

Carry on . . .

 

Clearly, the Prince of Darkness still haunts the marque.

 

My thought exactly. WHY make it easy. That takes out a bunch of potential folks. Young kids etc. I agree the risk is small but if the rest of the world has it, why not the US? I would think it would be easier to tool the car the same for all rather then an exception.

I do think we are "beating a dead issue" though. It is the way it is. But you never know Tilting at windmills!!

 

My car doesn't, and I suspect no other UK F-types have it as it doesn't feature in the UK Owners Manual.

It does have a locking filler flap though. How often do you leave the car unlocked and walk away?

 

From what I'm hearing, the flaps don't lock in the U.S.
Ridiculous!

 

While I understand the sentiments of folks (including myself) who really want the locking fuel cap, I don't get why anyone would actually try to argue against this.

Nobody on this thread does NOT want the cap. Folks are either indifferent or want it. Therefore, having the feature is either neutral or positive. It cannot be a meaningful additional cost, weight, or complexity since the vast majority of cars have it. It doesn't detract from the beauty or performance of the car or the driver's experience.

So it's a bit like arguing that there should be no high beams on cars because you never use them, or no nutrition labels on food packaging because you don't read them.
The existence of either doesn't really hurt you at all because you can always choose not to use it, and it has a de minimis effect on the cost or performance on the product while really satisfying the needs of a meaningful proportion of customers who do care.

It sure feels like arguing just for argument's sake. It's a classic red herring issue for designers. Whether or not you personally value a locking fuel cap, I think it's hard to argue that a locking fuel cap doesn't make for a better car, because some people care, some don't care, but almost nobody actively dislikes it.

 

Right, just indifferent, certainly not opposed or interested in arguing about it.

 

Awww. C'mon. Where's the fun in that?

 

I will both actively dislike, and argue against it being a standard feature for the reason I posted above. It is a known issue with Jaguar's implementation in the XF. I personally have had a few "close calls" where the fuel flap refused to unlock at the gas station, finally opening after several tries putting the key fob basically against the side of the car where the proximity detector is (my XF has the keyless entry system which extends to the fuel flap). I am pretty sure that this will fail at some point, necessitating a trip to the dealership (or mechanic) to be remedied. For me, I am confident that the probability of this happening is significantly higher than the probability of someone maliciously adding something damaging to my fuel tank given where I live and work. I do understand that for others the odds may be different, and they would prefer the locking fuel flap, but I for one am glad I don't have it on my F-type.

It would have been nice if JLR at least gave us the option, even though I would not have chosen it.

 

Respectfully, I don't understand this either because your counterfactual is a flawed implementation.
i.e. the argument is akin to "airbags should be optional because Jaguar often has defective airbags".

In this case, the issue is not whether the lock should be optional. It's that Jaguar should fix their damn faulty implementation....and it's not that hard because the overwhelming majority of cars in the US have perfectly working locking fuel caps: they could just OEM the entire assembly for very little cost. Ford makes millions of 'em and there is already a healthy supply agreement between the two companies (btw...).

 

And...piling on...I DO believe airbags should be optional. They cost a ton and add weight. The odds of actually needing them are like winning the lottery. The one time a bag deployed on my wife, IT was the cause of her injuries".


Sorry: Off Topic!

 

OK, I pointed out the XF flawed implementation, but a quick perusal of the XJ forum revealed the same issue there. So, Jaguar's 2 most recent implementations of a "feature" that is not safety related, and not universally wanted have been flawed. Given a choice between that and nothing, I choose nothing.

Your counter is equally flawed - apples and oranges. There is good statistical correlation between properly implemented airbags systems, and fewer automotive deaths. I would be shocked to discover similar correlation between fuel door locks and automotive deaths.

Don't get me wrong. I'd happily accept a properly implemented locking fuel door on my F-type. However, if at the time of feature lock on the F-type development, the choice was between the existing flawed implementation and nothing, I'd argue that Jaguar made the correct choice. I don't know this was the case, and regardless I agree they should probably fix this in future model year releases, especially given the passion you and others have for it.

 

The point is, though, that Jaguar has made the decision to offer the feature for seemingly all markets other than the US. This isn't Jaguar being cautious due to flawed implementations elsewhere, this is something that's generally been fully implemented on the F Type and has only been excluded on US cars. That's what we're talking about here.

 

I think we're in violent agreement. The airbag analogy had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with root-cause: the problem is not the existence of the feature, it's the crappy implementation.

I'm sure there was some reason for them to omit in the US -- and I think you may have found the right reason...they hadn't fixed the solenoid issue yet and didn't want it to hold up market timing.

Jaguar does read these boards and I just hope they are able to follow the logic that a feature which some users feel passionately about, some users are neutral, and no users dislike should be something that gets implemented because there is almost no downside. Providing they get the damn design right, which is really easy to do.

 

Most cars which do have a locking fuel door also have a manual release mechanism as well. My wife's Audi has a locking door and it has failed. For about 3 months, I had to open the trunk and manually release the door each trip to the gas station. Not fun, but technically that was only 2 months over the almost 6 years of ownership so it wasn't that bad.

 

Seriously, off topic, but on the subject of airbags, my wife had a near-death experience with an airbag back in 2001, but it's not what one would normally expect to hear about.

We purchased one of the first modern-incarnation Mini Coopers back in 2001. About a year later, she was on a 3-lane interstate in the middle lane when the airbag deployed with full force right in her face. There was no collision or impact with anything--she was just motoring along at 70 mph. Both inner and outer lanes were occupied in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, but an alert driver in the right lane noticed what had happened and slowed down to give her a space to get over. She very cooly moved the airbag out of the way and managed to get over on the shoulder, and exited the vehicle, shaking like a leaf After collecting herself, she inexplicably got in the car and drove it home with the airbag hanging out of the steering wheel.

The Mini dealer came and collected the car that evening, and the boys from BMWNA were at the dealer the next day. By the end of that next day, we had an offer of a new Mini of our choice, or full purchase price. We chose the latter as my wife had no interest in Mini's for quite some time after that.

I never did get an explanation of what happened, but suspect that car ended up in pieces on in a test lab somewhere.

 

nope not on mine either... disturbing.... but couldn't we just use one of these?

 

Yes violent agreement that the current implementation is crappy, and possibly a reason for the omission. Missed the point of your analogy, but with that explanation I agree as well.

As an engineer that now runs an engineering design department, I am keenly aware that there is no such thing as a perfect product / design. Everything is a series of trade-offs, and this was one. There are others I'd probably be more interested in seeing them fix if they have limited resources to spend on fixing these trade-offs. For instance, in the convertible, when you raise the roof, the system rolls down the windows (if they were up) and then raises and latches the roof. It then does ... nothing. It leaves the windows down. I would hazard a guess that there are 2 scenarios that account for >90% of the occurrences for raising the roof. The first being inclement weather, and the second being arrival at a destination. In neither of those scenarios would someone still want the windows down. It should be a simple software change to add a command to raise the windows when the latch is complete.

At any rate, I think we can both agree that these are, at the end of the day, niggling issues. Jaguar spent the bulk their development budget on creating a great looking, great sounding car with very good driving dynamics, and they overwhelmingly succeeded in my book.