Once upon a time, the XJ was the default Jag in Shed of the Week. Gradually, however, the old warhorse is slipping away into motoring’s misty hinterlands, or indeed histy minterlands, a process that will please those who wish to move on from the company’s old pipe and slippers image to its excitingly new mad haircuts and androids one.
If the classified ads are any guide, which they are, the XJ’s replacement in the sweaty torture pit of sub-£2k motors is the XF. That seems like an incredible fall from grace when you remember the warmth and wonder with which it was welcomed on its debut in 2007, and for a good while after that too. Mind you, that’s exactly what happened with the XJ as well, so maybe it’s not so strange.
The X250 gen-one XF wasn’t the replacement for the XJ, of course: it was the S-Type’s successor. It was supposed to benefit from Jaguar’s ‘let’s go aluminium!’ body construction methods right from the start, but the company was in such a rush to get shot of the poor old S-Type that they settled for a modified Ford platform in steel, only switching to aluminium in 2015 for the X260 gen-two XF.
As a consequence, sills will need a degree of monitoring on gen-ones, but our 2011 3.0 Luxury shed was built bang in the middle of the X250 production run and doesn’t appear to be suffering from body rot yet. It’s a very clean-looking one-owner car in a lovely shade of dark green, so Shed is going to put the bland chatbot copy on one side and guess that it’s going to have a pretty good service history. The mileage of 178,000 might seem high at first sight, but that only represents around 10k a year.
Some of you will never entertain the idea of a diesel Jaguar, but that could be your loss. The 3.0-litre TDV6 240 twin-turbo lump in this car was also used by Land Rover. It generated 237hp and 369lb ft, enough with the ZF 6HP 6-speed auto (replaced in 2012-13 by the 8HP) to swoosh the XF through the 0-60 run in comfortably under seven seconds and on to a limited top speed of 155mph. Shed thinks the official average fuel consumption was 42mpg, which was entirely doable, and the CO2 was 179g/km, which if correct would put the annual VED bill at £335.
Landie owners bemoaned crank failures on their 2.7 TDV6 engines (spun main bearings starving the bottom end of oil), but it’s hard to find similar stories on Jaguar forums. That doesn’t mean to say they didn’t suffer from it. All Shed is saying is that it’s far from guaranteed to happen on these updated 3.0 XFs. Timing was by belt, with scheduled changes for that and the water pump initially put at 112,000/10 years, but Shed is fairly sure he remembers it being shortened for whatever reason, so the next owner might want to look at that. Jaguar dealers will probably want over a grand for this job, but indies will do it for £400 or less.
The last MOT in September had just one advisory for a corroded offside front coil spring. The testers have been patiently reporting that since 2021, and the owner has been just as patiently ignoring them. These front springs will eventually snap. A replacement from the likes of Autodoc will cost you £125 tops, or as little as £75 for a ‘sports’ coil. The job is relatively straightforward with a set of heavy-duty spring compressors as long as the shock mounting bolts aren’t seized up, which they might be. With that in mind, it’s probably best left to your friendly local spannerperson.
This is a Luxury spec XF, which means you miss out on stuff like heated/ventilated seats and blind spot assist that models like the Premium Luxury had, but even so the cabin is still lovely. The only option that you might wish the buyer had ticked is the one for the Bowers & Wilkins audio, which was described by Autocar mag at the time as the best in-car music system they’d ever heard.
Interior lights on facelift models could switch themselves on, causing battery drain and a potentially difficult/expensive trace and fix operation. Fortunately, our shed was registered in March 2011, and manufacture of the facelift cars didn’t start until July of that year, so that shouldn’t be a problem here. Backup camera screens went blank, but a pic in the ad tells us that this is still working.
Shed doesn’t know if this car will have it, but some XF owners have reported their boots randomly popping open while driving along. If Shed was writing the sales ad for a car with that issue, he’d describe it as an active air brake. Normal people would probably point the finger of suspicion at the boot switch, which on the X-Type was prone to getting water in it, or maybe at broken wires in the boot section of the loom where it moves with the boot hinge.
Something that didn’t always pop up when it was supposed to (insert your own Shed joke here) was the gear selector dial. If you’re lucky, that might just be a weak battery. If you’re not, it will be a new selector unit. The rotating air vents stopped rotating on quite a few XFs too when the stepper motor clutches wore out. Although the parts required to fix that have come down in price, the job still requires partial dash disassembly, and we all know only too well that labour costs only go in one direction.
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