This is something I've been turning over in my head for a few weeks now and I'm genuinely undecided, because on one hand the main dealer experience with Jaguar has always felt reassuring in a vague sort of way, like you're at least confident that the people working on the car have manufacturer training and access to the right diagnostic tools, but on the other hand the pricing at dealerships for anything transmission related is in a completely different stratosphere from what independent specialists charge and I'm struggling to convince myself that the premium is always justified for the actual quality of the outcome you get. The context is that my F-Pace, a 2018 with the eight speed ZF automatic, has started showing a behavior that I'd describe as hunting between gears when I'm cruising at moderate speeds on the highway, where it seems to be unable to quite commit to a gear and keeps shifting up and then almost immediately shifting back down in a way that's both slightly uncomfortable to experience and slightly worrying to think about in terms of what it might be doing to the internals of the gearbox over time. It's not happening on every drive and it seems more pronounced when the car is fully warmed up rather than when it's cold, which I found a bit counterintuitive because I'd have expected fluid related issues to show up more when things are cold and thicker rather than when they've been running at operating temperature for a while, and that pattern has made me less confident in the fluid degradation explanation that I initially assumed was most likely. I've been asking around and one person I spoke to who works in the automotive industry suggested the behavior could be related to the transmission control module or a software calibration issue rather than a mechanical or fluid problem, which would be a different kind of fix entirely and one that requires very specific diagnostic capability to properly identify and address. Someone else suggested I look into finding a specialist rather than defaulting to the dealer route, and mentioned that they'd come across a premium Jaguar gearbox repair workshop in Sharjah that had been referenced positively by Jaguar owners specifically for having the kind of diagnostic equipment and brand familiarity that you'd expect from a dealer but without the pricing structure that makes dealer repairs feel so painful, and that framing actually shifted my thinking a bit because I'd been assuming that specialist independent workshops were a tier below dealers in terms of capability when the reality apparently isn't always that straightforward. The thing that matters most to me in this situation isn't saving money for its own sake, it's getting a genuinely accurate diagnosis that tells me exactly what's causing the behavior I'm experiencing and what the correct fix is rather than a broad recommendation to replace components and hope the symptom goes away, and I'd actually be comfortable spending more if I trusted that the diagnosis was thorough and the repair was being done by people who specifically understood this gearbox rather than people following a general procedure. Has anyone here had warranty period transmission issues on a newer Jaguar and been through the process of getting it properly diagnosed and resolved, and if so did you find the dealer route gave you meaningfully better results than going to a specialist, or was the outcome similar enough that the cost difference didn't feel justified in retrospect?