New LRs and electronics

[p38arover]

From an LR workshop in the USA:


"As far as our guys in service are concerned, if we never see a 2003 or later Range Rover, LR3, or Freelander in this building they will be very happy. Want to know why?? Well, the LR3 is no longer diagnosed through Test Book, it's on the WDS system, which is the same as .....no...real close to the same as Jaguar. Why you ask?? Because the LR3 has a Jaguar V8 in it!
Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that the new Sport is also Jag powered?

The 2003 Bimmer/Rover no longer has a BECM. Instead the geniuses decided that it needed 7 miles of wiring and 23, yes that's right, TWENTY THREE control units. And not only are they all talking to each other, they are stuck in the damnedest places. for example, the new and improved, (choke-choke, cough-cough) Range Rover is notorious for the back hatch leaking. And guess where all that water goes? In the spare tire well of course! Oh, did I mention that the air suspension compressor is under the spare?? Guess what happens next?? Believe me you don't want to know.

The list goes on and on. Oh, and one more thing. Remember the advertising jingle, "Fords better idea?" Well get a load of this. Rumour has it that Ford is planning to install their V10 in the new Rover! "Oh what fun it is to ride!!!" or walk...needless to say what we see on the horizon is not that bright. The 23 separate units was obviously a stoke of engineering genius. But did the bright guy anticipate that when the battery goes dead that all of these controllers realize that they can't communicate with their buddies and they panic, sending cascading error codes into the system that you must clear one at a time before the car will start?? I doubt it.

I do believe that there may be a surge in sales, but it won't be Rover. By the way, this was all my opinion. Remember, everybody has one......or two....whatever! "
Ron

[drivesafe]

Sounds about right, I had my compressor replaced when the wheel well filled with water because the back hatch leaked during a heavy down pour.

As for the 23 control units, this is only the beginning, you are going to see even more, in a lot more makes, as time goes by.

The cost of the micro controllers that make up the control units is now so low that it’s cheaper to fit these than the cost of the wire it replaces and that what it’s all about. Eventually there will only be something like 4 wires running around the vehicle and these 4 wires will power and control everything in the vehicle.

As it is right now, if you get Land Rover driving lights fitted to your new D3 after you bought it, the dealer has to tell the onboard computer that there are there otherwise they don’t work.

These new electronic controls may or may not work to everybody’s liking but I personally think they will eventually make driving heaps safer and loads easier BUT a lot more costly to fix IF something goes wrong but as electronic replacements for mechanical parts have proven to be at least 100 times more reliable, chances are the replacement costs will be rare.

Cheers.

[DirtyDawg]

Well I wonder what the resale and the life span of these new electronic toys will be?
As a young bloke I enjoyed and could afford to work on my Series IIA with a simplistic tool kit and a bit of common sense.
I don't want to have to have a degree in electrical engineering just to self fix my car...I don't know where it is all going but I do know personally I don't like the direction...now where did I tie up my Horse...

[JDNSW]

I think Drivesafe is right about the way the motor industry as a whole is going. The problem is already with us in a form he may not have thought of - for example I have seen relatively new (5yo) agricultural motor bikes scrapped because the cost of a replacement ignition module is more than the value of the bike - and the only way of testing it is to replace it.

Unfortunately, until these modules become more or less standardised (like light bulbs, batteries etc became in the 1920s) there will be a major problem with supply of replacement parts because as he says, faults are rare, and hence little reason for stocking many spares. And electronics advances so rapidly that there is little chance of it being possible to make a new batch of the modules even after five years, so you will only have available secondhand spares by the time a vehicle is ten or fifteen years old - and since the need for these will be rare, how long will a wrecking yard keep them before they end up in landfill? I think we are looking at a generation of cars that may be literally impossible to keep on the road, unlike all their predecessors.

[stevo]

I think where you have a couple of wires going around the car to the controllers is called multiplexing there was talk of only needing one wire that would supply power and carry the data,there are some heavy machines that use radio controllers between the two halves of the machine(loaders, articlating trucks) this means another battery and charging system running off the drive line.

[drivesafe]

Hi stevo, the system that just about all the manufacturers have settled on is based on Bosch’s CAN ( Controlled Area Network ) protocol so most of the modules will eventually be available through third party manufacturers and you will see things like the radio control type equipment be integrated with CAN.

Although there are different versions of setting CAN up and communicating with it, there is also a large number of companies manufacturing CAN specific micro controllers and this in itself will bring prices down big time.

It will eventually get to the stage where, when you buy a set of driving lights, the kit will have a module instead of the plain old relay and instead of having to do heaps of wiring you will simply connect the module to a power cable running around the vehicle and you simply run the wire from each driving light to the module. That’s it, no running wire to switches that have to be fitted inside the cab or trying to work out which of the headlight’s wires you have to find and connect to.

Fitting a new sound system with 10 or more speakers and not having to run one single speaker wire.

Need an additional power socket in the rear to run a fridge, fit a module near where you want the new power socket and the jobs just about done.

By the way, these modules will be no dearer than the cost of a relay.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what sort of advantages these new systems are going to bring.

Cheers.

[Jamo]

Yeah,

The thought of all those electronics drove me to tears the other day as I cruised along a gravel road sitting in the lovely leather seat at a climate controlled 22deg with the engine almost in-audable through the crisp sound of the Harmon Kardon; before going into sand mode to drive over a deep sandy rural lot.

It was hard to take!

[PhilipA]

Based on the performance of Land Rover so far, do you really think that they would install thick enough cabling to run a fridge? They have totally ignored customer requirements for oh 50 years , so why would they change now?
I will bet that the cabling will be juuuust thick enough to run what is there eg taillights, and no thicker to save weight, which is after all why they went to multiplexing , LED lights will further reduce power requirements and thus installed cable size..
NO I bet that in the future we will still be running a wire from the battery, and pulling out the trim etc etc.
Driving lights maybe as they will be options on upmarket models.
Regards Philip A

[drivesafe]

Getting a bit off subject but I beg to differ with you.

Land Rover have continuously lead the way in both mechanical and electronic advances, so much so that at times they have got it wrong but no matter what they did, you always had a safe option. You could go buy a Toyota and I’m not having a dig here because if you look at both Land Rover’s and Toyota’s history you will see what I’m on about.

Every time Land Rover develops something new, whether they get it right or not, about a decade later, good old copy cat Toyota comes out with what is usually an elcheapo version of the same thing except Toyota have taken 10 or so years to get it right.

We would not like it if Land Rover started to do the same thing by delaying new technologies for more development time because everybody else would have copies by the time Land Rover launched the new technology.

It’s a case of “ You can choose to drive the leader or select to trail behind in a poor copy “.

I know which one I want and am prepared to put up with a few teething events.

Cheers

[PhilipA]

I do not like Toyotas, as I think they have little character , however having a long history in the motor industry I have to admire their ability to to make products that a large number of people want to buy at outrageous prices.

The design of Land Rover products has often been over adventurous and immature for the intended purpose .
As far as "leadership" goes
The first Land Rover was a copy of a Jeep
The first Range Rover was a copy of a Ford Bronco.
ABS was on several cars before Range Rovers. They bull****ted about development for 4WD , but it was WABCO who designed the system as a turnkey package. A friend had to go to Wabco for the error codes as no one in Land Rover UK knew them.
Well they were first with air suspension . What a triumph.
Traction control is a by product of ABS . Land Rover installed it as a "cost down" on Disco until the customers demanded diff lock back.

You say that the Japanese are followers. They used to be but now who has the biggest selling hybrid in the world? Starts with T.

I think that appropriate technology is the issue here. Toyota is deliberately conservative with Land Cruiser as that is what the customers want in Australia and Saudi Arabia, the two biggest markets . Australia was the last market in the world to have solid front axles on Landcruiser, because that is what the customers wanted.

eg Customers in OZ want big fuel tanks. Who gives them big fuel tanks.Starts with T.
eg customers in OZ want powerpoints in the back . Who gives it to them. Starts with M and I think T.
Oz Customers want reliability over sophistication.Who gives it to them. Starts with T.
Its got a lot to do with markets .Australia is the second biggest market for Toyota for 4WD, so we tend to get much more input. We are tiny for Land Rover so we get what the UK /Europe/USA wants. .
Do we in Australia really want all independent,Ford Explorer based 4.0 engine, chassis and running gear on a Disco that weighs 2800KG? a 4.4 V8 with an 90 litre tank? The market is telling Land Rover to shove the 4.0 litre in a dark place. The 2.7 diesel luckily is brilliant, a Koff Jaguar engine and is the probably the only thing helping the Disco 3 to its current miserable sales figures. It is just not selling.
How about a $45000 Disco with the 2.7 diesel, weighing 2000Kg with a 150 litre tank, with independent front and beam axle rear suspension with good articulation via coil springs and maybe rear self levelling and diff locks front and rear. Conventional wiring and only one computer to run the engine and Trannie. AND completely reliable like my mates Land Cruiser 80 series which in 160 K has needed a new radiator. Nothing else.


Going by the sales figures, Toyota ( and Nissan) has the offering that customers in Australia want. . Who in his right mind would prefer to take a car with 23 computers into the desert over one with none. Were Land Rover thinking of their Australian customers when they designed it? I think not.

Its a great idea. Just like BMW run flat tyres with no spare. So suitable for Australia.

Regards Philip A

[JDNSW]

Landrover have always been short of capital, and their products have always shown it. As Phillip says, their first Landrover was a copy of the Jeep - but so was the first Landcruiser, and the first jeep was an even closer copy of the Bantam, which in turn was a sort of copy of the Austin 7. It turned out, by luck, that the first Landrover's construction method, chosen to use available materials and minimum tooling, made it far more versatile than anything else on the market.
The first Rangerover came with only two doors because they couldn't afford the tooling for the four door model - and I don't think you could call it a copy of the Bronco, although the concept was similar.
I think you have hit a nail on the head though, as I commented in another post, Toyota have been very good at changing the design to suit Australian requirements, where with Landrover we got whatever they thought was suitable for the rest of the world. And fuel tanks are a major point. In my view, any car sold in Australia should have a range of at least 1000km, and offroad vehicles should be more. But have Australians been all that good in the past? Who remembers that at the time Landrovers had a ten and a half gallon tank giving a range of 180 miles if you were lucky, the "pure bred" Australian Holden had an eight gallon tank with a range of 200 miles if you were lucky. This in an environment where most petrol stations closed from about 5.30pm, closed 1pm Saturday and closed all day Sunday, with, for example, only one all night service station between Brisbane and Sydney.
Landrover were hardly the first with air suspension - dates back to the early sixties for Cadillac and Mercedes for example, and oleopneumatic self levelling in Citroens from 1954, licenced to Rolls Royce from 1970.
But they did have some firsts or at least near firsts - first successful coil suspension offroad car, one of the first small turbodiesels in a mass produced car.
John

[drivesafe]

When push comes to shove, I’m a novice when it comes to off road driving but I can take my Range Rover and D3 places where you can’t get a toyota and be before you think other wise, at an off road training course last year, after taking loads of crap all day from the want to be toyota owners. On the last hill of the day, I had finally had enough so while all the want to be’s were having to get run ups and thrashing the guts out of there toys to get up this hill, I went for a Sunday drive and just strolled up the same hill never having to go over 10 kph because all the crap electronics you are on about, made me the expert the want to be’s reckoned they were.

And if the D3’s are so bad, why are they winning so many comps and getting all the awards under the sun.

It’s not a case of whether people in Australia want something or the other, you buy a Land Rover because you want that vehicle.

I have absolutely nothing against toyota’s it’s just that, in my opinion, a taxi cab has as much character as a toyota 4x4.

And As far as I’m concerned, Land Rovers are “ the best 4x4 by far “

One more point, toyota’s hybrid is nothing more than a copy ( as usual ) of VW’s 1980 dual power Golf. Plus unlike the Golf, the toyota hybrid is a crock of ****e because it is actually LESS fuel efficient on the open road than larger vehicles. In other words, it nothing more than a shopping trolly, come to think of it, that’s about as good as any toyota.

Cheers

[PhilipA]

No resist resist No I can't resist.

The P76 won car of the year.

In the US the Jeep Grand Cherokee beat the D3 in the 4x4 Magazine car of the Year. the Yanks reckoned that the D3 was too heavy to go well in sand, had poor fuel economy and power , and that it was far noisier than the Jeep. I have never seen anyone else say the D3 is comparitively noisy, but I bet it is .
Having had experience with motor journalists,as Distribution Manager of BMW and the Motorcycle Sales and Marketing Manager,( and National Distribution Manager of Ford Australia) I can tell you that journalists luuuurve "features" that they can write about. Mainstream journalists will rarely write anything negative about a new model. That only comes out when the next model comes, when they admit the old one was **** but the new one is great. If they write negatives , test cars are suddenly not available and that is their livelihood.
Only last week there was an article in Autospeed claiming that ABS was a great safety feature.I did a dredge of the literature and found that the NHTSA in the US had recently done a SCIENTIFIC study which showed in aggregate that ABS does nothing to reduce accidents overall . There were several other studies saying similar things. Yet Michael Knowling still wrote back saying that he thought it was worthwhile, against the evidence.

I congratulate you on your driving prowess. maybe you are better than the Toyota drivers . A "Natural Born Killer er Driver". But what if it all fails . Have you got the skills to then drive the track? If your traction control takes a holiday the limited travel of the all independent suspension will stop you pretty quickly.

The problem is not when everything works, its when it stops in the middle of a track, desert, wherever. eg the well documented D3 suspension collapse on beach. You can lose a car with that. The D3 is still new and these things are happening. What happens when they get old?

I remember a prominent 4WD politician went on a trip with the club. half way along the track his 38A went through a creek and the dash lit up. No traction control, ABS etc etc. He had numerous tries at a rock shelf ( which needed at least traction control and preferably lockers) until he blew a radiator hose.( another 38 A problem.) Went over the Simpson and his rear air bags fell out numerous times.

If the D3 is so good , how come it doesn't sell. Even the journalists in OZ say its good value compared to a Prado/Landcruiser. But the buyer is not buying it.
Regards Philip A

[spudboy]

I am 100% with Philip A.

This is the reason I've not updated my TDi 300 Disco 1 to a new D3. Don't get me wrong - they are fabulous cars and I really love that Diesel V6, but I live on a farm which is full of dust when it is dry and mud when it is wet. When something breaks, how does the average bloke fix it? Without a TestBook and a degree in electronics, you can't.

I had an air suspension Rangie for a few years and the damn height sensors were very sensitive to dust/mud, so that went.

So - instead of a D3, I ended up buying an ex-Telstra 130 TD5 (Still with electrics, I know....) and kept the D1. So now I have two LRs for half the price of a new D3.

[Scouse]

I remember a prominent 4WD politician went on a trip with the club. half way along the track his 38A went through a creek and the dash lit up. No traction control, ABS etc etc. He had numerous tries at a rock shelf ( which needed at least traction control and preferably lockers) until he blew a radiator hose.( another 38 A problem.) Was that the one where the coolant caused an engine bay fire?

[PhilipA]

No, just a lot of steam.
Luckily , the son of the then club president is a Land Rover Mechanic, and shortened the hose , as it had blown just at the stub of the heater outlet.
But our friend was pretty ****ed off by then.
Regards Philip A

[PhilipA]

Gotta share it.
Page L10 Financial Review.

Land Rover LAST in JD Power 2006 Initial Quality Survey with 204 faults per 100 vehicles!!!!!!!!
For the first time design features are included in the survey.
Nuff said.
Brave new world of D3 .
Regards Philip A

[drivesafe]

I congratulate you on your driving prowess. maybe you are better than the Toyota drivers . A "Natural Born Killer er Driver". But what if it all fails . Have you got the skills to then drive the track? If your traction control takes a holiday the limited travel of the all independent suspension will stop you pretty quickly.

The problem is not when everything works, its when it stops in the middle of a track, desert, wherever. eg the well documented D3 suspension collapse on beach. You can lose a car with that. The D3 is still new and these things are happening. What happens when they get old?



First off, most of the toy drivers were instructors so yes it was my vehicles electronics that made the day and by the the way, it was great to see those watching me, call their mates over to see how easy the RR was doing the climb.

As for failure worries, my MkIII now has over 150,000 and the one and only time it has failed, was on road so I have no hesitations about taking it or the D3 off road.

Cheers.

Ain’t jealousy a bitch.

[gghaggis]

I congratulate you on your driving prowess. maybe you are better than the Toyota drivers . A "Natural Born Killer er Driver". But what if it all fails . Have you got the skills to then drive the track? If your traction control takes a holiday the limited travel of the all independent suspension will stop you pretty quickly.

The problem is not when everything works, its when it stops in the middle of a track, desert, wherever. eg the well documented D3 suspension collapse on beach. You can lose a car with that. The D3 is still new and these things are happening. What happens when they get old?

A D3 without traction control will still retain the use of it's air suspension, and I believe that, contrary to what you post above, this still gives at least an equal amount of wheel travel when compared to the older model LRs. Perhaps you meant "... if the compressor takes a holiday"??

Whilst I somewhat agree with what you say, I don't think the inability of the average individual to repair these cars will remain a problem forever, and I don't think it applies to just the new Landrovers. Almost all of the documented failures with the D3 are software-related. Other than faulty air compressor valves, the mechanical side of these beasts seems to be pretty reliable. Obviously, with the right software and a laptop, a lot of these types of faults that may occur with a new D3, Landcruiser, BMW etc can be either rectified or temporarily got around. More and more people are looking at the software issue (I know I am), and once these cars come out of warranty, I think you'll see more stimulus to develop open software for just these sort of problems. CANBUS is a pretty open standard, after all.

I keep hearing the phrase "I don't want to have to be an Electrical Engineer to fix my car", and "I could fix anything on the old one". But think about how long it took you to become an adept DIY mechanic. It will take a fraction of the time to become an adept lap-top user. You will just have to adapt ......


And I don't think drivetrain reliability is really a strong suite to hold when arguing for the older Landrovers!


Cheers,

Gordon

[Jamo]

Lets get a few things striaght here.

My wifes step-father has the latest model Jeep Grand Cherokee with the 3.0CRD. It is Definitely noiser than the D3, so I think the yanks may have been a little parochial in coming up with that one.

I have had my compressor fail whilst on a very sandy beach and had the car drop onto its belly from 'Extended mode'. I was still able to drive off the beach and back home (albeit with lots of ploughing and belly scraping).

As for 'surveys', they are all designed to enable specific data manipulation to produce a desired outcome (ie. we know what the answer we want is , so we design the survey to deliver it!). Anyone whose ever worked for the Public Service (as I did for 12 years) knows this one!. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I've been through dust and mud and there's been no problem with ingress to any electronics. Remember that theses are electronics and not electrics (there is a difference!).

Anyone who heads off into the bush believing his toyota won't break down is a moron!

I consider myself to be a reasonably easy going person, but I get really ****ed off with folks who slam something that they don't own, have no experience in, and gather all their 'reliable' info from magazines and hearsay.

Oooohh! Beware the evil D3 electronics!! They'll fail on you!! Everyone who 'knows' says so!! All those journos who've driven over 40,000km over all types of terrain in one.... hang on a minute....what's that you say... you're right.. there aren't any!

[olbod]

If I was going to buy a new Disco it would be the coil spring model.
I would feel more comfortable about modification options, I think.
Cheers.

[Walrover]

wistle,wistle,wistle:angel:

P.s. Real Land Rovers have Leaf Springs:D

P.p.s. They break too!:mad: