Has that ever happened to you? It's a very common problem when cars get
old that the Stabilitrak and the ABS and the traction control and all that stuff
just starts to intermittently die on you and it's usually because of the wheel
sensor on one of the four wheels either going bad or you know an electrical
problem from corrosion... So first step in diagnosing a wheel sensor problem which
is the root cause of these Stabilitrak and ABS issues is to jack
the car up in the air first, put it on jack stands like I've done here
Once you got the car up on the stands like this you can see from removing the
tire that white wire right there that's the wire that goes to the... the wheel
bearing and inside the wheel bearing is the wheel speed sensor. Now each one of
the wheels has one of these sensors in it and all four of them have to be fully
functional at all times in order for the traction control system and the ABS and
all the related subsystems to work properly. If at any time the signal from
one of these wheel sensors from any of the wheels gets interrupted it becomes
intermittent or it fails altogether the whole system will fail and you'll lose
everything all your Stabilitrak and ABS and traction control will go and
you'll get messages in your dashboard indicating that. A lot
of the time you know you send it to your mechanic he'll just want to replace the
wheel bearing and that'll be expensive you've gotta pay for the parts and the
labor to replace it and all that but sometimes it's really nothing. Sometimes
it's just an intermittency from this connector for example this wiring
harness might not be fully clipped in all the way and that could be giving you
know a discontinuity like the signal is not continuous and the computer gets
confused and disables the system if that happens so sometimes you just need to
like disconnect this clean it with some contact spray or something and reconnect
it and get a good electrical connection there.
Other times you'll have an issue with the other half of the harness, the
part of the harness that actually goes to the car which is this piece over here.
Check the condition of this shroud this plastic shroud that covers the cable if
it's damaged in any way that could mean that you're getting a shorting
going on between the wires if they're shorting out then that again could cause
electrical issue that would confuse the computer and that would have to be
patched up repaired and then you have to find out what's actually causing it to
wear away in the first place. One thing you can do again you know safety
permitting once you've established that you've got a safe way of doing this is
to actually try to simulate the problem while it's on the jack stands in midair
like this so what you can do is if you've got two people you know you put
one person in the car, put the car in park or make sure it's in park initially
when you start the car up, have the person put their foot on the brakes to
make sure that nothing spins and then while their foots on the brake you put
it in Drive and then you can have them release the
brake you know while you're clear of the vehicle so that you're not going to get
hurt and you can see the rotors spin and then they can turn the steering wheel
back and forth to simulate turning hard left turning hard right and you can see
the travel of this cable you can see how it moves when the whole steering
assembly rotates left or rotates right if there's any kind of binding or
stretching of the cable or it's rubbing on something you'll be able to possibly
see that.
So as you can see the wheel's spinning now and if you turn the
wheel you can see how that cable moves around
and you can see in the case of this one it looks like it's
fairly uninhibited. It doesn't look like it's actually
damaged or it doesn't look like it's rubbing
anything or stretching or pulling on anything so let's go and have a quick
look around the other side of the vehicle
and take a look at that one.
Alright so now we're on the right-hand side of the vehicle over here and
where's this one here? Just a second...
I gotta find it.
Okay there we go. Alright so here you've got you can see the color of the wire's
different. That's because the driver's side wheel bearing was recently replaced
and this one is the original. So that's a blue wire I guess on this,
on the original and the other one was white I guess and if we
look underneath, you can see here something's been going on here. Clearly the cable has
been eroded or damaged by something rubbing against it and I suspect this is
what's causing the problem because the system only fails intermittently and
only when making left-hand turns so something involving the left-hand turn
is causing these wires which are now exposed from the damage to possibly
short or become intermittent you know some other way. I think that they're
probably shorted because enough of the installation has been ground away that
you know turning the wheel fully over to the left-hand side is causing them to
short on each other and give that indicator light inside the car so what I
want to do with this to see if I can fix the problem before I, you know, waste
money on a mechanic is I want to wrap these wires in electrical tape and try
to protect them a little bit better than they are now see if the problem goes
away and if that solves it then it may not be a permanent fix but at least you
know what the problem is and you can possibly save your money at the mechanic
shop by telling him, "hey this is what the problem is so don't bother wasting your
time checking every little thing, you know it's a wire that
needs to be repaired or whatever and need to figure out what's causing this
thing to get, you know, sanded away in the first place."
Okay so I've got some electrical tape here, again this is not a permanent
solution but it's going to be a means of testing the hypothesis that the wire
being you know eroded away or worn away is actually what's causing the issue
here so you can see right there oops right there this is the damaged wire or
wire I suspect is damaged and I take each individual strand you can see the
outer insulation's already been torn away and you can see the wires
underneath so I'm going to take the wires that are inside and wrap each one
individually in some tape and then once I've wrapped them individually then
I'm gonna wrap the entire bundle in tape and we'll see if isolating those wires
from each other actually fixes the issue and, you know if we see that the
message come up any more on the dashboard what we're driving around and
turning the wheel.
The car's on, I don't have a traction control light yet. So anyway this is a
quick way that you can diagnose and kind of spot repair this very common vehicle
issue that happens on older vehicles right in the safety of your own driveway
without having to spend any money and sometimes you know it's enough and you
can save yourself a few hundred bucks.