2008 BMW 328i - ABS and Traction Control Light On
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Customer Complaint: ABS light is on and wants it repaired.
General Information: The most common cause of an ABS light that I run into, is a wheel speed sensor. I don’t know how many I have replaced in my career but I know it’s a ton. A wheel speed sensor is just a sensor that tracks the speed of each individual wheel. When the ABS module detects a wheel is spinning different from the other wheels, like hydro planing, it will activate the ABS motor to get things under control.
Diagnostics: I simply used the scan tool(Snap-On Zeus) and read the codes. What I found were codes for the left rear wheel speed sensor. It seemed to have set codes in most of the modules.
The next step I took was to take it for a test drive and look at each wheel speed sensor. My goal is to really see if the left rear speed sensor is acting up. You can see from the picture below that the left rear speed sensor is definitely not working.
What could cause this to happen?
There can be a few things that causes a speed sensor code. The most common is a wheel speed sensor.
Other causes could be a broken wire, a bad trigger wheel (what the wheel speed sensors reads), or a bad ABS module.
After putting in a new Wheel speed sensor, everything worked fine!
Fixed!
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