My well maintained 2005 Toyota Camry runs very well on dry road. But I have been facing an issue when the road is wet. When I accelerate the car from a stop position, it looks like the front wheel does not start to roll immediately. It feels the wheel is getting stuck on the road and I feel a slight jerking and noise of rubber friction with the road. It will start rolling in 1-2 second and will run fine until I stop. Once I stop and try to start again, same problem happens. It happens only in wet road. My old tire had the issue and I replaced with new tire which did not solve the problem. Any thoughts?
Does your car have the stability & traction control function? If so, maybe something to do w/that. another idea, somewhat related, if the brake on the other side is locking up for some reason, or being applied more forcefully than the other side, that could cause the less-forceful-braking drive wheel to have all the power applied to it, and could make it slip on the road surface.
Could be a sticking brake caliper or the rubber hose to that wheel could be collapsed inside holding brake pressure.
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I’m with @oldtimer-11 on this one. You absolutely must verify that wheel’s brake caliper operation. Do this easy test… Go for a short drive…say 1-2 miles, hell even less than that… Get out of the car and touch the lug nuts on each of the front wheels. Be CAREFUL whilst doing so…the wheel that is behaving strangely may have lug nuts so hot they can burn you…so touch them with that in mind. If you notice a vast difference in temperature between the two wheels, then you found the problem. Which will almost surely be one of the calipers hanging up. The one with the higher temp lug nuts is the wheel with the bad caliper.
If you find this to be the case, do yourself a favor and replace both front calipers and pads. I would also not be surprised (if you did find a caliper to have been hanging up) to find that wheel’s rotor is also damaged by heat warping. Rotor warp is easily figured out by driving and feeling the brakes out…any pulsation or steering wheel vibration upon braking at from speed from say 50-60mph will be the rotor/s
But definitely do that quick temperature test…remove hubcaps if you need to do so to access the lug nuts/metal of the wheel … Or you could be tricky and buy yourself an infra red temp gauge with a laser pointer on it to perform this test…it will quickly and easily show you the temp with no finger burning possible. They are inexpensive and widely available…I use mine far more than i ever imagined, so its a good tool to have around.
Let us know the results of that test and good luck.
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how much tread was on old tire? you think the tire was/is locked and the car is actually pulling/dragging the tire along the pavement? i would think the motor would really struggle to do this as the weight of the front end is pushing down on the tires. have you had a 2nd person stand next to car and verify this is happening?
i have done this scenario with the rear wheels while leaving the E brake on. you can certainly feel that something is not right. i just cant see a camry being able to drag a locked front wheel. but, there are a few videos online showing drivers doing some crazy stuff
Thank you for the suggestion. I did the temperature test you mentioned. Lug nuts from both wheel were a bit hot but not so hot to burn my fingers immediately. Also they were equally hot on both wheel. Are they supposed to be in normal temperature? I am no expert on car so any suggestion will help me greatly.
I am not sure what are you asking to test. But yes, I feel the tire is dragging along the pavement.
OK, so if the lug nuts were actually hot enough that you could not hold your fingers on them, this could be a telltale sign of caliper issues. I do need to ask, how far did you drive the vehicle for this test? Did you have to use the brakes much or not at all…or did you use them a lot? Did you happen to start out when the vehicle was not in use/cold start?
Ideally it would be best to have started this evaluation from a cold start (which I forgot to mention, sorry) so that no residual heat would be included in the comparison. It would also be helpful if you could avoid a lot of stopping and drive the car say 2-3 miles with normal braking conditions.
A clear cut case of caliper hanging would be a noticeable difference in temp between the two wheels under those test conditions. If you didn’t start out cold…then perhaps it would be easier to redo the test with the new info provided and shamefully excluded prior…I apologize about that.
The lug nuts can, under normal usage and conditions get pretty hot this is because they are part of the front wheel assy which includes the brakes and rotors…the rotors get quite hot on a daily basis and the wheel studs/lug nuts are in close relation to the rotors. What we are looking for is a temperature difference between the two front wheels lug nuts after a relatively short ride without a lot of braking involved…some, but not excessive braking. We want to see if this ride is generating an abnormal amount of heat in one of the rotors up front…the lug nuts give you an idea of rotor temp and can also ID a hanging brake caliper. From your description of what occurrs in wet conditions it sounds like a fairly well locked up caliper, so this should be easy to suss out.
Another little test I often do when I suspect a caliper hanging up is braking until you are just about stopped (slower than walking pace)…put the car in neutral and let it coast to a stop…does it very slowly come to a stop and then roll backward a little bit of “freewheeling”…or does it actually come to a positive stop without any brake pedal input? The vehicle should have a free wheeling characteristic to it and actually try to roll backward just slightly when you do this test…repeat the “coasting stop” a few times to get the feel of it, I’m sure you can figure it out. I tried to explain that as best I could.
Have you been noticing the vehicle feeling sluggish acceleration wise? Is your fuel mileage poor? Sometimes you can even smell a caliper hanging by a burning brake smell. See what you get with these quick tests now that you have more info. That infra red handheld thermometer really comes in handy for this sort of thing… They cost about 20 dollars at Harbor Freight and will do the job quite well. Hell you can even jack up the front end and feel the tire rotation characteristics…they should rotate freely without much rotational effort involved.
See what you get with this new info for the quick tests.
Sorry for the late reply. I did another test from cold start. Started driving early in the morning. Drove around 2.5 mile without frequent stop. None of the lug nuts were hot enough. They were slightly warm but there was no difference between the temperature.
About other test, I believe it had a little bit of freeewheeling. I would like to run this test couple more time. Acceleration wise I don’t feel any sluggishness or poor fuel mileage. I would rather happy about the car as I never had any major issue. Only this issue bothers me as I don’t know what it is.
Do you have traction control that the wheel sensor might be incorrectly thinking the wheel is slipping and putting the brakes on? Can you pull the ABS fuse or turn the traction control off and see if it still does it? Could be a bad wheel speed sensor? Wet condition doesn’t make much sense unless it senses a slight wheel slip.
Wheel bearing going bad but that doesn’t make sense in wet except you may not notice it when dry. When I was a kid I remember seeing a car going up a snowy hill in the morning with one of the front wheels actually not turning all the way up the hill. I chalked it up to stiff grease in the wheel bearing from sitting out in the cold all night.
I don’t have traction control.