one, two, three, four! Rev up your engines! It's time for the Scotty Kilmer Channel today I'm going to show you what to do
if your ABS brake light comes on, now practically all modern cars have
anti-lock brake systems or ABS, and when the light comes on if you're driving, it
means there's a problem, and a code is stored inside the computer, here's how
the system works, when you're driving and you step on the brake hard, the ABS
system prevents the wheels from locking up and then skidding on the road, all the
wheels have sensors on them, that tell the computer what the speed of each
wheel is, and if the computer ABS system sees that one wheel has stopped moving,
and the other wheels are moving, it will pulse the brake on the wheel that's
skidding, so that it won't skid anymore, in theory it's a simple system, but of
course it's all run by computers, so in order to figure out what's wrong, you
have to have a fancy computer like this, but for your own peace of mind, these ABS
systems are fail-safe, so if your ABS light comes on and your abs system isn't
working anymore, it reverts to normal non ABS brakes, and
I've been driving my old cars for years without ABS brakes, so it doesn't mean
that much to me, and I live in Houston so we don't get much snow and ice, so I dont have to
worry about skidding on snow and ice very often, maybe four times in the last
40 years, but if you want to figure out what's wrong with the ABS, you get one of
these stand tools I have someone who has one, plug it into the dash, and as you can
see it's found a fault in the ABS system, it found a trouble code, it has an open or
short in the ABS solenoid relay circuit, now without such a scan tool, you're
never going to figure out what's wrong, so you got to have one, or pay a guy that
has one, to analyze such ABS problems, and I have to admit that I cheated here,
because the ABS in his Lexus, I've never seen one actually break unless it
was in a wreck or a flood, I pulled the fuse for the relay and
that's why the light came on, now if it had been a more complex problem, check
out all the information this thing can go through, it can go through a lot of
testing, a wheel speed sensor was bad, it'll show you that it's not showing
speed, while the other ones do, you can do all kinds of tests with one of these
machines, but you can't do it without it, and sometimes it's super expensive
parts, like this abs modulator that can be more than $1,600,
but as I said earlier, they are fail-safe systems, when the system stops working it
goes back to normal non ABS braking, so if it comes on while you're driving on
a road, you don't have to stop driving the car, if it's snowy and icy, you got to be a
lot more careful, but you can still drive the car, so now you know what it means
when your ABS light comes on, instead of freaking out, use a little knowledge to
understand what's going on, and remember if you have car questions just visit the
Scotty Kilmer channel.
