ABS Outage

[ytsurkytsur]

I have an 88' 325ic, my wife recently decided that her automotive skills did not require verifying which post was positive/negative while jumping the battery. Now my ABS light is constantly lit. Checked the fuses under the hood, all good...is there a relay or another fuse panel I should be looking at? Or, could this be something entirely different?????


Russ

 

[epj3]

I have an 88' 325ic, my wife recently decided that her automotive skills did not require verifying which post was positive/negative while jumping the battery. Now my ABS light is constantly lit. Checked the fuses under the hood, all good...is there a relay or another fuse panel I should be looking at? Or, could this be something entirely different?????


Russ

I'm willing to bet the ABS system got fried. BMW's electrical systems have a weird way at messing stuff up... You can prob get the control unit real cheap... if you turn out to need it, I'll try to pull it out of my previous e30 for you.

My question is why did she use the battery? There's a positive post in the engine bay that should be used to prevent problems.

 

[ytsurkytsur]

Probably because I didn't know the post was there...

She used my portable charger and instead of looking at the battery markings she assumed the brown "ground wire was + (her reasoning, "Brown is close to red so I thought that was the right one"). Ended up calling me at work and asking, "When I connect your charger should it make a loud squealing noise and smoke?"

I have never worked on a BMW (or any vehicle that has ABS) so I have no idea where to look concerning the module you mentioned...

Thanks for the quick response...Russ

 

[jrt67ss350]

I doubt the ABS control unit got fried. Most of the time, it just fries the master relay for the ABS system when you improperly jump the car. The ABS computer is located underneath the steering column under the dash. If you pull the fiberboard cover off of the underside of the dash on the driver's side, you'll see the ABS computer. The ABS master relay is located right above the ABS computer.

 

[sm32589g]

You are not supposed to jump it it fries the computer of the car. I don't think the ABS computer is fried you might want to get the computer looked at, or you can replace the relay for the ABS there are multiple one's but its probably the bright silver one that you can see wen you pull the kickboard off and look underneath. You won't be able to see it unless you're really down on the ground.

 

[jrt67ss350]

Actually, that's not true - you can jump these cars without a problem. You just have to pay attention when doing it because when you accidentally reverse the polarity of the jumper cables, it tends to wreak havoc on the electrical systems in these cars.

 

[epj3]

Actually, that's not true - you can jump these cars without a problem. You just have to pay attention when doing it because when you accidentally reverse the polarity of the jumper cables, it tends to wreak havoc on the electrical systems in these cars.

Yup...I don't understand why people say "you can't jump a bmw!!" when bmw clearly put a positive terminal under the hood for a pretty obvious reason.