RAMBLE alert... Having had some time to try to assess my broken Evoque situation I have typed the following in my usual "thinking in type" process to assist my understanding in the hope it might help other Luddite thinkers such as I...
Our RR Evoque was a reliable vehicle up till the first wheel sensor issue at six years old and at a time when I had long since given up maintaining my good lady`s cars given digitisation effectively locked me and my kind of logic out of maintenance and repair processes. OK so I was also fed up playing with digitised kit of so many types and becoming ever more reluctant to roll around the garage floor..
When the RR failed in while my good lady was out shopping, the on-board systems presented more than enough alarms to scare and defy the logic of anyone..? Logically she used the expected "process" which then sucks us in with a phone call.. to the breakdown insurance service, wait two hours for a man in a van to turn up and plug in his reader, to determine it is best not to drive the car as he suggests that the problem is a wheel sensor, but can not say which one ??? Further to that he suggests that sensor failure causes the programming to instigate some sort of diff lock, it thinking the brakes have failed, and with a possible diff lock driving the car could damage it further, thus he will arrange a flat bed recovery, and as it is a Sat afternoon the JLR dealership will not be opened, so recovery to home is the likely best option...
Flat bed arrives with another car already on it which will have to be decanted to be able to load the RR, that process likely to take some time so we head off home and the flat bed will arrive whenever it does an hour of so after we are home. Phone the dealership on Monday Morning, they can not take the car in for three weeks..! I take time to look around for anything obvious and find a bracket dangling from a wheel rotation sensor wire which the dealership had forgotten to re mount when they last had it in for a service and recall for steering rack replacement and brake pipe replacement... The weeks pass and the flat bed arrives to take it to the dealership... Car repaired with a £480 bill.
Ever felt you have been trapped in a PROCESS..... designed for what purpose though..? Either to give dealerships the opportunity to fleece you, or to keep the brain dead safe, they perhaps becoming increasingly system dependant to maintain their safety EXPECTATIONS when they are "driving" their digitally programmed machinery which step by step is taking control of ever more of the normal day to day driving processes that us baby boomers were well used to..?
Similar fault occurred five months later, though this time the dealership approximate two months before they can take it in for repair, my guess is that they give regular customers priority, regular customers being those who change their cars every three years PCP deals or some such..? Should the story told to me by my garage owning friend be in any way true in that the dealerships storage yards might be jammed up with JLR products with electrical issues they can not resolve....Hmm..?
Rather than be without my good lady`s car for a couple of months I reluctantly get in amongst it suspecting a wheel sensor issue again, given of all the alarms that displayed, the only one I could not dismiss by pressing the OK button was the ABS warning in yellow... not RED... Assuming a red alarm would be a more serious failure...?
Located the front and rear wheel rotation sensors to determine the degree of difficulty involved in removing and replacing them, and as to where the link plugs to the wiring loom would be hidden away under the wheel arch plastic guards...I cleaned the crud off the area around the sensors and liberally sprayed WD 40 on their fixings to hopefully ease the possible removal process, that done I found the part numbers and ordered up two wheel sensors, one for the front and one for the rear, (two different parts) to ensure I had a wheel sensor for both locations should that be the cause of the fault this time round...Ordered from Brit Part via the web.
Also this time I was determined to drive the car despite the fault and dire warnings, as I have a reasonable idea of the way ABS operates and that it is just an ABS failure and NOT a total brake failure..! Understanding that one is just driving a car as it used to be in times past with an ordinary brake system and NO fool-proof ABS is all that is required to drive safely.... HOWEVER... initially when you drive off ABS still creates pumping in the pedal initially to cause you to know there is an issue, accepting all the many alarms leaving only the ABS alarm displayed allows one to continue driving as it seems at that stage of the game the digital systems finally give over control to the driver and the car drives fine without it`s ABS system operating, which is likely to be no big deal for those of us who understand that road surfaces can affect brake performance, and can factor that in by increasing braking distance expectations...?
As for the breakdown mechanic who talked of diff lock...perhaps he knew the score and was trained by his company to involve more of his company`s resources to keep him and his likes in a job...? Is this all beginning to read a bit like a conspiracy theory..? (-:
Now with the RR proven to drive without causing some sort of self destruction... I drove it to my friends garage on the m/way and at 70MPH .... where he plugged in his reader and identified the front nearside wheel sensor as being the cause of the issue, and now having one such to hand it was a relatively simple replacement task.
With all the sophistication and over complication, how simple would it be for the on board systems to generate a ABS FAULT, NEAR SIDE FRONT WHEEL SENSOR ISSUE. OK so it could be that it was not the sensor in every case of such a fault, perhaps crud build up on the reluctor ring causing a spurious frequency to be generated by the sensor and read as a problem by the ECU... But at least it would avoid all the confusion of spurious alarms being generated...
Spurious alarms..? OK so without ABS a deadhead might be best scared out of their wits that they can no longer drive up the rear end of the car in front without the beeping sensor warning them they were far too close but to generate an CHECK ENGINE warning... where is the LOGIC in that...????
All those alarms now cancelled by the programmer, the only requirement was to replace the identified wheel rotation sensor..... Were I a garage repairing the car I all so easily spin a wonderful fairy tale of all the work involved in clearing each and every one of the faults that appeared on the dash....and charge a fortune for doing so...Hmm..?
Seems to me that if you are not in the clutches of PCP and replacing your car at the end of the finance arrangement, you are likely to be at the end of the queue when it comes down to receiving service or repairs, unless the dealership`s mechanics are short of work, which it seems JLR dealerships may not be according to reports from elsewhere reported here...Hmm..?
Of course not being in the motor trade I am likely to be just typing a load of ..CONSPIRACY THEORY....?
Now ask me why I drive a carb fed Morgan that I could understand and repair MYSELF....? OK so it is without Apple Play.. Hmm..? It seems Morgan owners who were at one time happy to get involved with their cars may be well into the process of leaving it to others as they age..? I for one can go with that. As for the results of loosing a degree of self reliance or "make do and mend" as my parents generation would have known it.... plenty of evidence to be found on TM as to the evolutionary processes that may have created such...err...processes...?
