Trail Control Fault

[jeff@sea]

2024 BadSas with Lux. Stock. 16k miles.

Today at 12,000 ft after about 4 hours of off-roading Trail control showed “trail control fault see owners manual”. On dash OM states check owners manual or see tech.

Once we got back to camp, my wife saw the aux 6 switch on (we don’t have any aux equipment installed). Once she turned it off, the fault cleared. Any ideas why the fault and if aux 6 was related?

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[Brian_B]

I’ve never heard of that fault and can’t think of any reasonable way the Aux switch could be tied to it….

But these Broncos do weird things when the battery gets low… so as a cheap check I’d put your battery on a charger over night. Decent odds the problem just never comes back.

 

[Valhalla]

Possibly it was arching, grounding at the wire?

 

[Brian_B]

Possibly it was arching, grounding at the wire?

These modules on the Bronco are finicky enough that anything is possible, but I would think if the Aux6 line was grounded out and arcing, that it would pop fuse 65 @ 10A and be done with it after that.

But again, anything is possible and these Bosch modules seem to really hate voltage instability of any kind... maybe it was arcing but not more than 10A, and that was causing a module somewhere to go apecrap?

I'd still throw it on a battery tender over night and just keep a close eye on it - since that doesn't cost anything to do really. One of three things will happen:

1) It'll pop right back up, because something really is broke somewhere (like a harness got snagged on a tree limb or aliens or something)

2) It will be fine for a while, but pops back up in a few weeks, and/or with other weird crap like Service Brakes or weird unexplained changes in radio volume (battery ~was~ low, and the charge fixes it temporarily, but it drifts low again (once AGM batteries go they cannot hold a charge worth crap - and the gremlins come back)

3) It'll be fine and this particular issue will never ever come back again (just some random thing - seems to happen a lot)

 

[BigMeatsBronco]

my off roading toolbox is my laptop...highly suggest bringing one with on any long journey!

 

[NC_Oak]

does flipping aux 6 back on bring the fault back? I say this but would be mildly hesitant (or at least prepared to act) if there is a short to ground or other. After reading about our latest scorched bronco

 

[DeathValleyBob]

I’ve never heard of that fault and can’t think of any reasonable way the Aux switch could be tied to it….

But these Broncos do weird things when the battery gets low… so as a cheap check I’d put your battery on a charger over night. Decent odds the problem just never comes back.

 

[DeathValleyBob]

Were you in Descent control mode? My non-sas BL, MY23 threw a similar code after 15 minutes on a long downhill section of a trail. My brakes were so hot that I could smell them when I got out to check. Like your experience it told me to check the manual. You know, the one that only exists digitally. After using the clumsy dashboard search for a while I could find only vague references to this mode and absolutely no information on what to do after receiving such a notification. I only learned of that specious mode at the OffRodeo event. I wrote a more detailed history on this forum a year ago. Good luck finding it with their equally useless search engine. BTW it would be very unlikely consequence of the AUX switch position: those things are independent of almost everything else on your Bronco. Look at dangling wires on the far left side of the firewall, they should all have shrink tubing on the ends, there are 9 or so to check.

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