how to drive 'J' gate. secrets of the Jaguar XK8 XKR ep 75

Hello everyone John, here and today in the garage, I want to share a secret with you that really shouldn't be a secret and that is how to

drive

j

gate

and j

gate

. This particular and very elegant design of the transmission gear selector system is sort of a Jaguar hallmark until maybe the , so basically it was the paddle shifters, um, moving from the J-gate. so the j-gate should do what your paddle shifters do, however, from my experience of talking to owners every time I encounter them at shows, etc., plus the comments we get on the YouTube channel and a lot of the emails I get, and this is very confusing.

It's logical, but I estimate that almost 60 percent of xk8 owners don't actually use the left side of their j door and it's a bit of a novelty actually and they still don't recognize how useful it is and, as we say, how to

drive

it. Jay Gate that's not a criticism because a lot of these cars are bought for their cruising ability and at the end of the day if you can do that and you go forward, do that and you go back and it's all done for you beautifully, smoothly, powerfully , Yeah. I don't need one or two different things anymore, so today I just want to take a little time to look at Jay Gate and how a car drives with Jay Gate.

I would like to start this segment by saying that this video is in no way intended to be disrespectful to those who do not use Jay Gate in the way I am going to describe and do not want or need to do so if their car is used solely for comfortable travel at moderate speed . speeds, you don't live in a mountainous area etc. then yes, using d d is fantastic and our car's gearbox combined with the transmission computer combined with programs will give you a fantastic experience, but for those who are interested In it, this is what we offer.

The next thing we're going to explore is saying that everything we're talking about with jj only really applies to the x100s, so if you have an x150, then you have a half j door at best and paddle shifters that they are great but different or you have a five liter etc, all that kind of xjs era, this is the same system, so I'm pretty sure almost everyone who sees this will be very familiar with the right side of the j gate, so I'm just sharing some ideas for complete, please don't I don't think I'm trying to teach you how to suck balls, so p is the initial position which means park.

The car can be started with the gear lever in this position if you try to move the gear lever out of this position without the engine running. without your foot on the brake, it won't come out because it's mechanically locked, so we're going to start it up and now it still won't come apart until I put a brake on it and then we can move on to the next position. Parking does not replace the parking brake. Parking will stop the car from rolling, but if you leave it on a hill while you're parked, what happens is you put pressure on the gearbox and sometimes it's very difficult to get out of park because it's resting on the mechanical posts inside the gearbox. gearbox, so we must always set the handbrake and park before releasing the footbrake.

The next position is reverse as soon as you are in reverse. I have my foot on the brake right now. If I release the brake, we would start moving and the reverse is higher. In a first gear, you can go pretty fast in reverse, but the throttle opening in the car is limited in reverse to make sure we don't go too fast and the torque converter applies maximum slip in reverse to make it an action. smoother in neutral, this is the other gear you could start the car in, for example for random reasons the car stops while we are driving, you can push it forward into neutral and try the key to restart it, it will only start in parking lot. and neutral in neutral no matter what we do with the accelerator, I release the brakes, the engine will accelerate, we are not going anywhere, the engine will only accelerate to four thousand five hundred rpm and it is automatically rev limited in neutral at that point, throw it back to drive and depending on how we are driving and the circumstances transmitted by various sensors around the vehicle, the car will run programs and we will select the correct gear.

My car is a five speed gearbox. It will select the correct one of its five gears according to the circumstances it sees and it will select the points at which it changes gears based on torque effort, revolutions, etc., in d if we use the s button we increase the point at which the car believes . It needs to shift and start some other programs and then if we drive vigorously more programs will come in that will do 99 of everything you ever want to do and if you are not interested in driving spirit or saving brakes that is absolutely fine.

We have the other side of door J. First, you'll notice that mine says 2-3-4. That's because I have a 5 speed gearbox and in this scenario the 5th gear only engages when I'm in d. If you have a six speed car, six speeds only engage when you're in d on the left side, you can basically imagine them as manually selectable gears, not entirely true but it's a good starting point if I have the shifter in four , so what that means is that the car is capable of selecting first second third or fourth depending on the driving conditions but it will not select fifth fourth is the highest it will go and you can over rev the car because we are not in neutral, the limit revolutions now is six thousand eight hundred rpm.

If I select it, then the car is capable of selecting first, second, third, but not fourth and fifth, and will stay third even if we are accelerating hard. Second, the car is capable of selecting first and second. but it is not capable of selecting third, fourth and fifth on its own, it can rev the engine too much. You will notice that you cannot select first manually, this is because it is very easy to rev the motor too much and put it under too much stress. excessively, that's when you're going down a steep hill and you let off the accelerator to let the engine and transmission decide when it's appropriate first, you don't have that option, so okay classroom style conference, let's do something more fun. louder and more outdoors the gestures you are about to see are not intended to be rude, in fact it is me trying to leave myself clues to synchronize two totally different cameras and sound recordings, so here we see a handsome young man in a dress particularly nice.

Tg, what could I say and I'm going for a drive in the country and completely within the speed limit enjoying your vehicle, the car is not in sport mode, you saw me turn off and that's really just to emphasize a point that of otherwise it would be difficult to approach, so as I approach these corners, um, I enter them with a light throttle and I may want to exit that corner reasonably quickly in doing so. I need it to be in a lower gear now the d setting does that for us but pay attention to the sounds and what you'll see is because I'm approaching a corner, I release the throttle and as I release it the engine thinks it's easy to shift and it puts it in a higher gear and therefore it basically moves by inertia and only when you go out it detects that you are stepping on the accelerator. and I think, oh he wants to accelerate and he's accelerating enough, I'll shift down, so the downshift is late and I just shifted and I didn't need to because the gearbox and the car can't see what.

You can see that You can't see the exit of the corner and because the gearbox doesn't know what you're thinking, it shifts up at a point where in a manual you would be shifting down and is never ready for the corner and exit. now let's see how to drive directly into jk using the left side of door j. I can preselect a lower gear on the way into the corner which gives me some engine braking but it also means that when I hit the throttle it accelerates instantly, it doesn't downshift twice because in the previous condition it will have changed just before the corner and then does that lag while doing the two shifts before acceleration and the car is a completely different animal when driving.

This way even the sport mode doesn't do the same, you don't get the correct gear preselection and instant acceleration because the instant acceleration is interrupted by making two shifts before you are ready and in the correct gear, whether manual or El JK's left side is not truly manual, it gives us that flexibility and that emotion changes the character of the car completely. Try it and see how it goes. So, so, so, that's what all this does. Why do we want that if I'm Driving with spirit, are you having fun? And I go around the curves. The car will select the best gear for the circumstances and it does this through smart things like looking at the wheel speed sensors, looking at the torque, looking at the way you drive.

You're driving around looking at whether you have sport on and off, uh, all kinds of cool stuff and it makes great decisions, it can feel almost everything, however what it can't feel is what you can see and what you're thinking. in d I imagine that I am going to a curve and I think I am going to launch into this curve the car cannot know that it sees you decelerating it sees that you are not making any effort at the moment so it will continue changing gears at as high a speed as possible to save fuel and save effort, so it will probably be in 4 4 5 when you enter this type of corner.

As you go into the corner, you press the accelerator and even though you're going pretty slow, um. If you want to go into that corner, the car is in fifth gear, it has to feel, oh, how nice, the accelerator pedal has been pressed quite hard, it has to feel that it is at a particular rev and what gear it can go into, it has All of that adds up to a big delay before the car possibly goes from fifth at corner entry to second because you stepped on the accelerator or because we're humans, what we can do is go, I'm going into this corner. .

I'm braking, I'm going to want second on the way out and the car will shift into second, the revs will go up because you're slowing down and when you get to the point where you want to accelerate you hit the accelerator and you go and it's instantaneous if you have a 4 liter naturally aspirated v8 normal that it's about talking and responsiveness d masks that are talking and responsive massively if you enter a corner, hit it in two and then hit the ground on the way out, you will find that you have In a completely different car, you will feel that the rear It squirms a little, even with the traction control on, you'll feel that instant torque and acceleration not dampened by the programs running on D.

This is the additional sensor. We can see what the road ahead of us knows what we want to do, so tell the car before we get there. Some people are afraid to turn the gear lever to the left on the grounds that it may cause too much acceleration, and it certainly can. the rebels shout, but the important thing is that let's say I decide to take a sharp curve and the first time I pass it I'm going to go, I'm going to stay in third, that's great and I'm going 50 miles per hour wherever. As I go into this corner and everything is great the next time I try it, I think I know I'm going to try to pass second at 50 miles per hour.

Don't put too much weight on these figures if I do that and the The car has run, hello, if I actually select second given the highway speed I'm doing, the revs will go over the redline, the car will stay in third until appropriate go to second, only this one was protected, so make your decisions. If you do that, you're not going to rev up to 10,000 rpm because if you went there, the car wouldn't let you select second, so what you can really do is drive the car manually and you can accelerate using this as well, and the car It's a little faster if you press the gears at the exact moment, you start in two and the car will select first, if you are in sport mode it will go first and then it will shift into second and stay in second until it decides to shift, shifts into third, it will stay third until you decide to change, it goes to fourth equal and selects fifth going to d and the movement from left to right is activated, all you need to do is basically touch the gear stick and on top of that it goes back you have to be sure and again it is just to prevent people from accidentally selecting the left side of the J-door.

Another reason you would want these manual gears is to give you automatic gearboxes with engine braking. They're set to basically use the highest gear they can at any given time, by default, it saves fuel, it saves effort, it saves noise, everything else, so when you're going downhill they tend to think, oh, this is easy andthey shift up and up and up and as they do so you go faster and faster downhill, and that's a feature of many automatic gearboxes. Some of the more sophisticated modern ones will detect lean and whether you've hit the brakes and make all sorts of adjustments, but not for older people. cars like ours, so if I approach a steep hill I can see that I'm going to go downhill for a while while maybe I'm in a queue of cars going down there, I don't want the car to get faster and faster fast I don't want to go half a mile with the brakes on they're going to burn out I'm wasting my brake pads I'm overheating everything I'm glazing my brakes and potentially damaging them what would I do? be doing in a manual car I would change the gearbox and let a bit of engine break down um I would take the tension so in the xk8 what you do is look at a long steep hill on a country road think carefully , I'm not in a hurry and it gets down there a little slow I didn't have If you have an idea of ​​how tight the curve is at the bottom, you would probably put it in third gear and take your foot off the accelerator and the engine will slow you down as you go.

You go down that hill, it gets very steep, let's say you're going down. one of our classic passes like, say, Poor Lock Hill, which is about a 25 grade. I don't care how brave you are or how empty you think the road is, you should stay there and that will give you a lot. of engine braking that you will complement with the foot brake, but you will not travel the entire mile and a half downhill with the car with the brakes full because the engine will also slow you down much older. um the cars will have p r n d and then three four two three whatever or low um but they didn't have this fancy setup that separates this is the automatic side this is the manual side they didn't have programs running behind it it was just the cable link and they're not nice systems. in terms of its touch.

Using this really feels great when you master a J-gate and start driving it manually. It is an absolute pleasure to use. The feeling is magnificent. smooth, it's got that beautiful detent, the way it jumps from system to system, it just feels great, very tactile, very beautiful and really no one else replicates it today. Jaguars tend to have a rotary dial to select the various standard programs and use them. paddles to make these selections and what that has done has technically given us a better system in terms of quick shifting manually, but the average Joe will never use those things and certainly not for things like hill descents etc, they are just something that we decided oh, I'm over 50, I don't wear those, whatever it is, I'm being flippant, this I think is a big loss.

I'll be really interested to see your comments below if you're a fan of j-gate the rotary selector which is the xf system or we've moved away from that completely. You like flappy popsicles. If you're a fan of the x150, then maybe the Flappy palettes are your thing. I hope you enjoyed this video so much. As I enjoyed doing it, it's a tactile thing, it's an audio thing, so it's hard to describe and it feels good to end with a nod to the late great Jim Ranville, who died in 2019, was director of engineering at Jaguar and after whom.

The nickname of our shifter is the randle handle. He is the guy credited with developing it and also looked after the xj 220 and xj40. What a great man. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe, click the bell icon and allow notifications. We can let you know when new things come out and consider visiting the website to see all the good things we have there. If you want to support the channel, you can do so by purchasing a sticker or a hat. I will never be charged at any time before any of the videos, we will leave you with a few more seconds basically enjoying yourself on the streets in the hopes of inspiring you to play with Jay Gates and only to notice that my engine note is not really, for As harsh as it may seem in these pictures, it's a microphone mounted on a camera mounted on the arm cap in the wind, but see you soon, guys.