My First Post

[AliKelman]

I today, with my wife, put down the deposit on a grey Jaguar X-Type 2.1 V6 SE 4dr. We will be collecting it in a couple of week's time once we have sold our present runabout. It had been converted to LPG back in 2012 by its previous owner. It has 74,000 miles on it. The conversion was properly done and there is an entry for the car in the official LPG register so I should not have any problems in insuring it. I checked with my insurers, Direct Line, and they appear to have taken it in their stride - nothing frightening in the premium.

The Jaguar we are buying is a front wheel drive vehicle - rather than the AWD car which launched the X-Type. It has a radio cassette unit in it but no bluetooth. So I plan to add an ION Bluetooth Cassette adaptor so that I can take calls in the car. I currently have a rather more expensive Parrot system in our present run-about but I don't see the need to transfer this across. I will be transferring a small Garmin SatNav system to stick on the windscreen on the driver's side and plan to have this wired into the fuse box. I feel that this will give me the best of both worlds - an up-to-date SatNav with bluetooth and traffic warnings with a car stereo which cannot be hacked and which will still function as a hands-free telephone and media centre.

 

[Old Peter]

Welcome to the Club, Alistair.

The X type is very good car and although I have never driven one with the 2.1 V6 engine [I used to have a 2,5 V6 AWD] I have heard that it is a nice and rather smooth engine.  With LPG it will be very suited to London.

The very first X type did not sell very well, as they were merely rebadged Mondeo Ghias  ---  they sold less than 100 and were replaced by the 2.5 and 3.0 litre AWDs, the latter selling very well in the USA and Canada and the only thing Ford was engine and floor pan. Nothing wrong with that.

The changes you are making sound interesting.  Any help you may need will be forthcoming from some very expert members.

Regards,

Peter.

[AliKelman]

Thanks Peter

I'm going to be taking delivery of the car in about a week to ten days. But I took a look into its background. It currently has 74,000 miles on it with a fully stamped service book. The last service was in February 2016 at 68,322 miles. The LPG conversion was done on 22 March 2012 when the car had 45,425 miles on it. They installed an 80 litre tank so the LPG tank is bigger than the petrol tank. It sits at the back of the boot - when I get the car I will upload some photographs.

The engine has run on LPG for about 27,500 miles - at 20mpg the saving was only about £750 by my reckoning. The LPG conversion cost £2,148.64 at Lloyd Ash Garages. So the previous owner's investment did not pay off - although I think that there are reports that these cars may run better on LPG than petrol.

Edited April 5, 2017 by AliKelman
Typo in the mileage

[Old Peter]

Hi Alistair,

There is a free App which you can get on a mobile 'phone called Vehicle Smart  which gives you the detail of any car plus its MOT history which can be rather useful.

Regards,

Peter.

[AliKelman]

Thanks Peter most useful. I'm turning the fact that the car doesn't have bluetooth from a negative feature to an asset. My wife took our current car, a Hyundai i20 out last Sunday on her own on the M40. When driving in the middle lane the clutch failed suddenly and the car became undrivable. She managed to get to the hard shoulder. Here she found that bluetooth hung on to her phone even when she was out of the car trying to get away from the threat of an impact from the careering lorry traffic. Like me she finds driving and speaking on a phone very distracting and we tend not to do it for safety reasons. But now we have a second reason - having to turn off bluetooth before using the phone in an emergency situation is simply not sensible.

I am putting the app Drive Safe on her phone (and mine). This is from a young app developer in the Republic of Ireland. It senses when you are in a moving car, sends out a message to say you are driving and cannot take the call and does the same for texts. Only if someone calls three times in succession does the app allow the call to go through - realising that this is an emergency.  

Drive Safe coupled with the ION Bluetooth cassette in the radio/cassette slot should make the Jaguar a very safe place to drive in all conditions.

[AliKelman]

Collected the Jaguar yesterday afternoon so these are my early impressions.

First of all getting LPG fuel for it. I had anticipated that I would be able to get this from a local BP station which was listed as an LPG garage. But I quickly found out that ALL the BP stations around me have ceased selling LPG - although the topic has not been covered in the motoring press. I found an article from February 2016 which said "A spokesperson for BP told MMM that, "We have decided to remove LPG from some of our stations. As a retailer we have to review the goods and services we provide at our sites on a regular basis to make sure they are competitive and financially cost effective. LPG sales have continued to decline over the long term as manufacturers have stopped supplying LPG cars and the number of LPG cars reduces over time. As such we are taking an approach of removing LPG on a site-by-site basis from our company-operated sites when it would no longer be financially viable to continue. There are a further 900 BP branded forecourts in the UK are operated by third party operators (‘dealers’) who independently still have the option to include LPG pumps at their sites."

LPG was originally supplied at petrol stations for cars as a potential alternative to diesel and unleaded but has fallen out of favour as the government moved to provide incentives to promote the use of cleaner, emission-free electric cars."

Fortunately, I was able to locate an "Autogas" at Junction 3 of the M1 at Mill Hill. The "Autogas" pump is near Pump 17. But here I found the next problem. Putting LPG into a car using the hose is not quite as straightforward as filling with petrol. The gas hose in pressurized and has to be locked into the gas intake valve of the car. So the hose is at least double the diameter of a petrol pump hose and is covered by a type of chain mail mesh covering. It is heavy and the gas passing through it causes it to get cold. The videos on YouTube of ladies connecting their LPG cars to Autogas pumps are misleading - this is not a job for delicate hands. This piece from Fifth Gear in 2013 gives a fairly accurate analysis of LPG in cars. 

The body panel of my Jaguar tended to flex a bit as I connected the LPG nozzle - it is on the opposite side to the petrol filler. It took a bit of fiddling but I was able to connect OK. LPG at this Autogas station was £0.609 per litre with Unleaded Petrol selling for £1.19 per litre. My Jaguar had an 80 litre LPG tank and took 63.88 litres to fill it to capacity - the rest is protected for expansion. Total cost £38.90

Next, I tried out the ION bluetooth cassette in the radio/cassette slot. I did not like the way it worked with my bluetooth phone since I could not use the car's own controls to answer a call. It was pointless and dangerous having to take the phone out of a pocket and swipe it to answer a call whilst driving. So I took it back to the store (Maplin) and got a full refund. Instead, I bought for £3.99 from Amazon a "DigitNow! Car Cassette Adapter, Listen to your iPod or another audio device through your car's cassette player, with a 3.5mm headphone jack". This works just fine when playing back podcasts I have downloaded from BBC iPlayer Radio on my mobile phone or tablet. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best since taking calls while driving is dangerous.

Then this afternoon when loading the car up with various possessions I found in the boot that a previous owner had had the remote 6-CD facility installed as an option - so the car could take and control six CDs. Suddenly those old CDs which I had filed away became usable again.

Tomorrow (Sunday) I will be taking the car out for its first long drive.

 

 

[AliKelman]

First long drive today and a problem - ending up in Limp Home mode

As I explained it is a 2004 x-type 2.1 v6 which was converted to LPG. I had done about 20 miles since getting it - mainly in filling up with a bit of petrol and a full tank of LPG. Today the engine appeared to misfire slightly, then the engine management light came on and stayed on. I filled the tank to the brim with Shell V-Power petrol - the premium petrol and continued running on this. The misfiring greatly lessened. The tick over seems a bit high - 750 rpm? According to the drivers manual the engine management light means that the car needs specialist attention by a Jaguar dealer and the car is running on restricted power ( which I presume is a bit like a computer running its operating system in 'safe mode'. So tomorrow morning I go back to the dealer I bought the car from - FM Motors (GB) Ltd at 824-826 Harrow Road, Wembley HO0 3EN - to see what they have to say. I think it is something pretty minor - but am hoping for some guidance from JOC members.

P.S. - I've joined JOC as a Premium Member today 

 

 

[JOE-DOT-COM]

Hi

Could be one of many things really, you won't know for sure till they plug in and bring up the fault codes

usually something like a missfire will cause it, so could be any thing like a duff plug, a coil pack, or even a split hose on the induction system

it might be worth investing in a generic fault code reader, that will work on most cars and will tell you a code and fault, these are generally under £30 now

you usually find, if you turn the ignition off and on it will clear the limp mode and drive normal and if you drive normal the fault wont come back, most faults occur when you have your foot hard down or under load, like going up steep banks, thats the favorite time for incorrect fueling, which causes misfires, which will cause the engine to go into limp mode, this protects the engine, as running lean, misfiring or pinking can damage the engine

cheers

Joe

[AliKelman]

Thanks Joe - This is a great help. Now ordered a generic fault code reader from Amazon - should get it tomorrow.

INTEY OBDII Car Vehicle Fault Code Reader Auto Diagnostic Scan Tool, Read and Clear Error Codes for 2000 or later US, European and Asian OBD2 Protocol Vehicle

Edited April 10, 2017 by AliKelman
Showing I have followed advice of member

[AliKelman]

Now spoken to the garage - FM Motors (GB) Ltd at 824-826 Harrow Road, Wembley HO0 3EN - and they have immediately booked it in for this afternoon for me. Should be easy to sort out. More news later ...

[AliKelman]

Now back from the garage and problem sorted. What appears to have happened is that the car had run low on petrol and only had 95 octane fuel in it. I filled it up with LPG which is equivalent to 110 octane. This confused the engine management sensor when it next started using petrol which caused the original misfire. By filling the tank up with 98 octane to make up a full tank everything started running smoothly. The engine management light had come on but was not flashing, to indicate a continuing problem - so it just had to be reset. Everything was and is working perfectly.

So I am a happy bunny again. Next time I should be able to do a readout and reset with my generic fault code reader.