After Two Months Of Jaguar XE S 'Ownership', I've Already Run Into Problems

Since taking delivery a few days before Christmas last year, I’ve really enjoyed my time with our Jaguar XE S longtermer. It’s brilliant to waft around in, has a fantastic chassis that makes it a great thing to hustle on a good bit of road, and despite the lack of limited-slip differential it will indeed do a pretty sweet burnout.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t all been plain sailing, and we have encountered a couple of problems. Issue number one concerns the heater: every now and then, we’d get a weird whining sound which would change pitch depending on the fan speed. It sounded a bit like the fan was being strained, and we also noticed that the climate control just didn’t seem that great at regulating the temperature.

Issue number two relates to the sat nav, which failed on me twice. On the first occasion, it was partially my fault, but I wasn’t too impressed with how the system reacted. Let me explain: all of the nav system’s mapping is contained on an SD card, which is located right above to the USB socket. As such, when using that nearby USB socket, I managed to knock the SD card out.

When putting it back in, however, the car just wouldn’t recognise the SD card. I restarted numerous times as instructed, and even tried walking away from the car, locking it, unlocking it and then restarting. But nada.

After using nothing more than my awful sense of direction to get me home (my phone was flat, also my fault…) and returning to the car hours later, it did finally ‘reinstall’ the data and wake up. Interestingly, I couldn’t replicate the above message no matter how many times I pulled the card out.

The second nav issue came when trying to get home from our recent Mazda MX-5 generations test. I keyed in my home address, hit the button to start the navigation, but it got stuck on zero per cent when ‘calculating’ the route. Time and time again I cancelled and re-planned the route, but it wasn’t having any of it. It wasn’t a signal issue either, as I left it at that ‘calculating’ stage for much of the journey home and it didn’t progress. As with the previous issue, I simply left it for a few hours after getting home, and all was well.

These aren’t particularly major issues, but you probably wouldn’t be best pleased if you’d dropped £45k on a car and it to have such niggles. It’s worth noting, though, that as soon as we informed Jaguar of the issues, the company insisted its technicians look over the car at the first available opportunity.

After spending a week with Jaguar’s tech people at Castle Bromwich, the auxiliary fired heater was replaced, and while the navigation system was checked through, no issues were found and the problem we had was “not one we’ve seen reported before”. We’ve had no issues with the climate control since, so all looks to be fixed there, although we did get an ‘SD card read error’ message on the sat nav of a Jaguar XF test car we had in a few weeks ago, which caused the whole infotainment system to reset. Could just be a coincidence, but to have four nav errors on two different cars doesn’t inspire confidence. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the XE’s system in the next few months to see how it fares.

With everything working well on the car now though, we can get back to enjoying it making the most of that lovely 335bhp V6. We’re approaching the 2000 mile mark, and will be clocking a fair few miles in the coming weeks. Oh, and if we can sort out all the details, we’re hoping to take it for a spot of drifting…