Freelander2 (2013 model) dashboard items non-functional

Try the landyzone

A fault on the dash in my MK2 Focus turned out to be poor lead-free soldering of the pins for the connector. A few minutes with a soldering iron and some "proper" solder cured it.

That fault also showed how ridiculous the design of new cars has got. I was driving on a motorway, in roadworks and hence with no hard-shoulder, when I lost all power. The engine would idle, but the accelerator did nothing. On switching off, it would take half a dozen attempts to restart and either only idle or work fine for about 100 yards and then fail again. It turned out that the security chip is on the instrument cluster and that faulty connection was causing the problem. Why on earth not have the security *IN* the EMU and so no chance of dodgy connectors causing such problems or why not have the EMU continue to work, even if the security chip becomes uncontactable, once running, as long as it was there when starting?

SteveW

I suspect cos they use off the shelf stuff and work around the issues by adding bits in unlikely places.

Its a bit serious on a car though. I used to find this sort of thing on Videos in the old days where a maker bought off the shelf modules then added bits of extra features that got around inbuilt features, but often when a fault occurred the main system was totally perplexed and gave up. Brian

Because it needs to read a chip embedded in the key, so the logical place is near the key. The nearest ECU to the key is the instrument panel...

indeed.

Hi... Thanks for that, I spent about 2hrs a few days ago with Landyzone but was unable to find anything meaningful!

Mine does that, tells me it can't read the key and I cannot restart the engine until it does read the key, the engine keeps running though. I normally hit the button to disable stop/start so I don't know if that is affected.