Disco 2 2004 D2 Traction control issue - Pulling left/right on flat dry roads!

Hi all, hoping someone can shed some light on an issue I'm having with a newly acquired D2.

Example 1: I can be driving along a normal smooth road at 30mph, and out of nowhere the TC light will come on and the car will either pull to the left or to the right, and the steering will feel heavy and I have to 'fight' the wheel to stay driving straight. I imagine this is because the traction control is braking one of the front wheels unnecessarily. Sometimes its very slight and isn't an issue, I just let off the accelerator then back on and it goes away. Other times though if I don't have a good grip on the wheel it can pull quite aggressively and can cause me to swerve unexpectedly. When it happens more agressively the car will struggle to accelerate until i let off and let the TC light go off.

Example 2: When driving on bumpy country roads this is much more exaggerated, and a wheel going into potholes or over recessed drains will trigger it too.

When I initially got the car it seemed like it only really pulled to the left hand side, so I replaced the front left ABS sensor as a bit of a shot in the dark but the issue still remained, though I then noticed it was pulling both ways. This may just be coincidience and I hadnt really noticed it pulling to the right beforehand. I do have the ABS relay out the car now though so I'm not endangering everyone else on the road with unexpected swerving!

I do have a friend with a proper Land Rover diagnostic tool that can read sensor outputs and such, but not really sure where to start with checking it. There are no stored codes.

Any help with diagnosing what it is would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Have you checked the front hubs for play?

MikeDISCO said:

Have you checked the front hubs for play?

Click to expand...

No I haven't, I will check that in the morning. Will failing wheel bearings trigger the TC randomly?

Hi, A worn wheel bearing will throw up several faults including the "3 Amigos" (Do a search if you don't know this already). It happens because the gap between the sensor and excitor ring in the hub is not consistant due to play.
I'm surprised ther are no faults logged.
Griff

Hi. It's a misballance between sensor inputs which can be due to wear in the hub or wrong hub fitted. If you've got the vehicle with this issue it's possible that the previous owner fitted a cheap hub which has the wrong number of teeth on the relutor ring then this is what happens.There is a tight range of inputs where the system doesnt identify a fault but it can consider that a wheel is spinning so the TC kics in. You can also check if there are shims under the sensors and if there are remove one of them each side. All you can do with diagnostic tool is to see the stationary live inputs and if one is different than the others there might be the issue. You can remove the sensor, make a mark in it then turn around and count the teeth in each hub, if you find one with 55 intead of 60 then that's it... the easy but not cheap fix would be to replace all 4 hubs with same brand... that's what i did 5 years ago when i had the same problem and it's been OK since . These are all the options i know