I wanted to put this in its own thread so other people having this issue could quickly find it.

This very helpful response below was to an inquiry I made in another thread about the up/down adjustment for the front seat cushion no longer working, even though the motor was heard to be running.

This occurred when I had lowered the front and rear of the seat to their extreme adjustment. Although the seat had adjusted fully in every direction before, upon lowering the seat fully and possibly all the way back (I don't recall) the lower seat cushion front would no longer raise or lower.

The recommendation below was absolutely correct, and simply 'snapping' the cable back into its socket fixed the issue.


A few things I observed:

- The cables do 'snap' into their respective sockets via very small plastic clips in a collar surrounding the cable. But like many 20 year old plastic parts, I suspect their grip has weakened over time as they don't provide much if any resistance to pulling right back out.

- To get the square cable drive back into its receiver, you may need to run the motor a few times to get the drive to align with its receiver. Otherwise it will not slide in.

- The reason this particular cable came loose appears to be because a plastic cable zip-tie that had once held it secured against the seat cushion springs had broken. This let the cable back out of its receiver, and I suspect also let the cable drop on the floor and likely catch on the carpet or even heater duct. That may have helped it pull free too. Replacing the cable zip-tie should help keep the cable in place (hopefully).

I had this repair on my list for a few months, and just never got around to it. But it really is a quick fix, maybe an hour if you really take your time to make sure nothing gets dinged or scratched.

And you don't have to remove the seat for this repair.

Upon removing the front and rear seat frame to floor bolts, you can easily lean the seat back and it will stay put.

This is also a good time to find loose change, vacuum and clean any stains from spilled drinks/food

 

An update, the cable popped back out about a year after the repair above. Good news is that it popped out at the height I prefer

I still think this is the correct approach, but need to find a better way to secure the cable but just haven't gotten around to it yet. So keep that in mind if using this repair to better secure the cable in place.

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Related thread:

https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...fitting-48786/

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The front rise fall on my X308 stopped working and I found (like everybody else) the cable out of the gearbox socket. What first puzzled me was to see the inner cable protruding out too much. I thought it must have disengaged from the motor side but I could not push it in any further and verified that it was properly engaged into the motor (pulled the cable out completely, reinserted it and could feel when the square went into the motor socket). Ran the motor and the cable was turning fine. When I measured the depth of engagement into the gearbox, I found that the inner cable was protruding out of the sleeve (in relation to the connector) 8 mm more than what the gearbox socket can accept and relised that the plastic tube has actually shrunk over the years and pulled itself out of the gearbox socket. As shortening the cable is not really possible (due to specially shaped ends of the squares), I decided to lengthen the tube. I had a bad short cable (brand new but with a crumbled tube) so I detached one end-clip. Cut-off the end-clip on the shrunk cable as shown on the pic and connected the new end-clip with an aluminium tube, glued with epoxy. Works perfectly.

Another way is to just cut the tube anywhere and lengthen it with a metal sleeve but I did it the way I described because I already had a new end-clip. The maximum that the inner cable can protrude out is 14 mm.

 

Well, that explains why the cable often fails to stay repaired after one just snaps it back in. Mine popped back out within a year of the initial fix, and I've just not bothered to snap it back in again.

I'll have to measure mine now and see if the cable jacket needs to be cut and extended too.

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Bought a couple of these for spare. The inner cable is sticking out quite a bit so the sleeve obviously needs to be extended. It looks like the plastic tube on all suffers the same problem - shrinkage. On my seat, the tube has not only shrunk lengthwise but also in its cross section. It took quite a bit of force to pull the inner cable out and push it back in. However, when fully seated into the motor socket, the cable could turn fairly freely. The hard pulling out / pushing in was caused by the square portion of the cable, which is slightly bigger in diameter (diagonally) than the round portion, passing through the tube. The tube cross sectional shrinkage was such that the square portion of the inner cable could not pass through it freely anymore.

 

Electric seats have been around for about a 3/4 of a century now, and memory seats probably from the 1960s.... one would think the manufacturers would have that all figured out.

The cables and the faulty potentiometers in such a simple thing is pretty frustrating.

Thanks again for researching this. I've got some spare cables too, so I'll use them to fix this issue. Curious that it only seems to effect the driver's side seat cable though.

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