Jaguar (or Lucas) designed their dash switches to be a mechanical engineer’s dream, but I am not sure reliability was part of the design scope.
I have familiarity with three switch types.
The first is the hazard light switch. You are driving a jaguar, so its pretty likely you will need this one to work. When I purchased the car it was not working, so I pulled it apart to see if it was repairable. Although interesting in its design, its pretty fragile, so I simply bought a new one and am careful whenever using it now.
The most used and hardest working switches control the windows, and these fail regularly. There are a few people who have taken them apart, cleaned them up and had good luck….but I am not one of those. Over the years, I have taken a couple of them apart, cleaned them up and they still did not work. These I buy new and always have one spare as a backup. For the series 2, the switches are still available and run about $50 each. To help the switches last longer, some have installed relays to carry the current to the window lift motor.
This weekend, I became familiar with the switches on the center console that are used for fuel tank change over, rear window defrost, map light and interior lights. The map light hasn’t worked for a while, so I decided to tear apart that switch and see if it was repairable.
The fuel tank change over switch gets used much more often than the map light switch, but I have not had any issues with that one. The map light has more, sustained amps running through it compared with the other one. For this reason, I swapped out the stock bulb with an LED, that ended up being brighter and uses less amps. Now I will be able to read that map……right, will have to find one first.