So today was an interesting day. I was driving on the highway, when I suddenly lost all power. The engine didn’t stall, but it barely responded to any throttle input, and if it did, there appeared to be some kind of soft limiter at 3000 rpm. This was pretty scary since there was a serious amount of traffic surrounding me, but I made it to the side of the road safely. I pulled over, tried to rev up the engine, and after a few seconds it did. I got back on the highway, and at first everything seemed fine, but a few minutes later it happened again. Once again, I pulled over, waited until the car would rev again, and then ‘limped’ to the nearest gas station to scan the ECU for any codes. The code P0500 appeared, which meant there was something wrong with the speed sensor. I thought this was pretty strange, as the ECU has nothing to do with the speed. The speed comes from the ABS ECU, which is then sent to the gauge cluster. However…
When I got home, I checked the M4 (Materia) manual to see what it said about the codes, and I found something interesting. Apparently, fuel is cut off when the ECU doesn’t get a speed signal. What frustrates me, is that I drove around 300 kilometers without any issues, and now all of a sudden it decides that it needs a speed signal.
I’m posting this story here because it relates to an issue I’ve mentioned here before: the CAN system. The CEL is on because the CAN system doesn’t get a signal from the ABS ECU. I used the wiring harness from a YRV, which means I also had to use that ABS unit. Because that ABS ECU doesn’t have CAN, I can’t run any wires to the ECU, which means no speed signal, and as is turns out, that signal is necessary for the ECU to work properly. So far the only option I can think of, is to make the ‘new’ ABS unit work with the rest of the ‘old’ wiring harness. This way I can run wires to the CAN high and CAN low, and hopefully solve the issue. The gauge cluster needs a squarewave signal from the ABS ECU which the new ABS unit doesn’t have (because it uses CAN for that), but I’m just going to tackle one problem at a time.
Pff, stupid Daihatsu and their fancy CAN system. It has given me nothing but headaches so far