So I've had this problem for a while now and need some help diagnosing further. I will put a disclaimer right here that I do not have a huge amount of knowledge or experience in car mechanics so am very much a novice to these things. All the info I have right now is from investigating myself and what I've read on forums like this and videos on YouTube.
Basically what is happening is at seemingly random times while driving my car beeps at me three times and the steering and abs light come on, the handbrake warning light starts flashing and my speedo stops working. Interestingly when you stop the car and restart it, all the lights are gone and the car seems totally fine. The car drives totally fine then at some point it will happen again, all the lights come on and it beeps at you. Stop the car, restart it and it's totally fine. While the lights are on there is no loss in power and the brakes seems to operate fine.
There is sometimes a strange noise that happens when I brake and there feels like resistance on the pedal and a kind of grinding/knocking type noise/feeling, it feels like the abs kicking in unnecessarily to me. But that goes away very quickly and all seems totally normal and happens seemingly randomly that doesn't seem to correlate to the lights coming on.
I had it put on a diagnostics machine, from a work colleague's brother in law who owns a garage, and we read the live feeds from the wheel speed sensors. It showed that the near side front wheel speed sensor was not giving smooth readings. Where the speed graph should be smooth as you speed up it was very jagged. While it overall was the same shape as the others it had many small peaks and troughs and it's readings were not fully consistent with the other three.
So having, I think, identified where the problem is, or may be, I set about finding solutions. The first few things I did were easy to check:
Check the fuses on the battery to see that none of them are cracked or broken.
Check the plug into the sensor to make sure it is fully inserted and not moving about and that there is no water bridging the connection.
Check the abs cables around the wheel making sure the wheel wasn't rubbing on the cable and none of it was visually damaged.
I was going to also check the plug into the bosch abs module in the main engine bay to see if it has any corrosion in it but it is awkward to get to and I couldn't get enough purchase on the plug to pull it out. I will try again soon.
Next thing I tried was cleaning out the reluctor ring, which I believe is built into the wheel bearing. So, with the help of my step dad who is much more mechanically experienced than myself, we took off the wheel, the brake caliper and the brake disc. Then unplugged and unscrewed the sensor and prised it out of it's holding, it was in there pretty tight.
The sensor did has a lot of gunk on it, so wiped all that off and then looked into the hole it sits in to look at the reluctor ring. It also had gunk in there and a particular big piece which made us think that was why the sensor was tripping as that big piece would work it's way around the ring and every time it got in front of the sensor it kicked off all the system lights.
So we used a paper clip, that was bent into a kind of scoop, to pull out the gunk and found that it was a small piece of plastic surrounded by gunk. There were a few of them in there, not entirely sure what they were but it does look like they are pieces of something holding the bearing/ring in place. Hard to explain without pictures or a diagram, didn't take any sorry.
Anyway after pulling all that out we put a little bit of copper slip around the sensor so that it would be easier to get out again and reassembled everything and hoped for the best.
Alas the next day the error started up again.
So, thinking of the cheapest option I have bought a new sensor as the existing one did look like it had scrapes on the end which might be making it faulty. I will fit that when it arrives and update afterwards.
I, however, fear that this will not fix the solution and the next thing I can think of is replacing the reluctor ring which would be a wheel hub/bearing replacement. I would get a garage to do this for me as my skills and tools are not quite advanced enough for this. If that doesn't work then I think it may potentially be the abs module as I have read that they can cause errors like this. Otherwise I think it could be a faulty cable or damage to the cable that I didn't spot.
I'm really just posting this here to get some more advice and opinions on this as I've exhausted all the forums on I can find and would appreciate more input form others and more experienced people than myself.
And open it up to suggestions to other possible causes that I haven't thought of or found out about.
I will also say that while all this has been going on I have had the front brake discs and pads replaced and the track rod ends replaced. And the offside rear brake pipe replaced. I also had a helicoil put onto the nearside brake caliper as where it bolted onto the hub was cross threaded. I don't know if this has any relevance but it may.
Any help would be appreciated and I will keep this thread updated with anything I do or try to fix it.
Basically what is happening is at seemingly random times while driving my car beeps at me three times and the steering and abs light come on, the handbrake warning light starts flashing and my speedo stops working. Interestingly when you stop the car and restart it, all the lights are gone and the car seems totally fine. The car drives totally fine then at some point it will happen again, all the lights come on and it beeps at you. Stop the car, restart it and it's totally fine. While the lights are on there is no loss in power and the brakes seems to operate fine.
There is sometimes a strange noise that happens when I brake and there feels like resistance on the pedal and a kind of grinding/knocking type noise/feeling, it feels like the abs kicking in unnecessarily to me. But that goes away very quickly and all seems totally normal and happens seemingly randomly that doesn't seem to correlate to the lights coming on.
I had it put on a diagnostics machine, from a work colleague's brother in law who owns a garage, and we read the live feeds from the wheel speed sensors. It showed that the near side front wheel speed sensor was not giving smooth readings. Where the speed graph should be smooth as you speed up it was very jagged. While it overall was the same shape as the others it had many small peaks and troughs and it's readings were not fully consistent with the other three.
So having, I think, identified where the problem is, or may be, I set about finding solutions. The first few things I did were easy to check:
Check the fuses on the battery to see that none of them are cracked or broken.
Check the plug into the sensor to make sure it is fully inserted and not moving about and that there is no water bridging the connection.
Check the abs cables around the wheel making sure the wheel wasn't rubbing on the cable and none of it was visually damaged.
I was going to also check the plug into the bosch abs module in the main engine bay to see if it has any corrosion in it but it is awkward to get to and I couldn't get enough purchase on the plug to pull it out. I will try again soon.
Next thing I tried was cleaning out the reluctor ring, which I believe is built into the wheel bearing. So, with the help of my step dad who is much more mechanically experienced than myself, we took off the wheel, the brake caliper and the brake disc. Then unplugged and unscrewed the sensor and prised it out of it's holding, it was in there pretty tight.
The sensor did has a lot of gunk on it, so wiped all that off and then looked into the hole it sits in to look at the reluctor ring. It also had gunk in there and a particular big piece which made us think that was why the sensor was tripping as that big piece would work it's way around the ring and every time it got in front of the sensor it kicked off all the system lights.
So we used a paper clip, that was bent into a kind of scoop, to pull out the gunk and found that it was a small piece of plastic surrounded by gunk. There were a few of them in there, not entirely sure what they were but it does look like they are pieces of something holding the bearing/ring in place. Hard to explain without pictures or a diagram, didn't take any sorry.
Anyway after pulling all that out we put a little bit of copper slip around the sensor so that it would be easier to get out again and reassembled everything and hoped for the best.
Alas the next day the error started up again.
So, thinking of the cheapest option I have bought a new sensor as the existing one did look like it had scrapes on the end which might be making it faulty. I will fit that when it arrives and update afterwards.
I, however, fear that this will not fix the solution and the next thing I can think of is replacing the reluctor ring which would be a wheel hub/bearing replacement. I would get a garage to do this for me as my skills and tools are not quite advanced enough for this. If that doesn't work then I think it may potentially be the abs module as I have read that they can cause errors like this. Otherwise I think it could be a faulty cable or damage to the cable that I didn't spot.
I'm really just posting this here to get some more advice and opinions on this as I've exhausted all the forums on I can find and would appreciate more input form others and more experienced people than myself.
And open it up to suggestions to other possible causes that I haven't thought of or found out about.
I will also say that while all this has been going on I have had the front brake discs and pads replaced and the track rod ends replaced. And the offside rear brake pipe replaced. I also had a helicoil put onto the nearside brake caliper as where it bolted onto the hub was cross threaded. I don't know if this has any relevance but it may.
Any help would be appreciated and I will keep this thread updated with anything I do or try to fix it.
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