'01 Honda Civic ABS Sensor Troubleshooting

chris.angeloni_147615
Sat, 23 Feb 2019 18:26:21 +0000
Maintenance/Repairs

Hi all,

Car specs: 2001 Honda Civic Ex, 2dr coupe, 5 speed manual, 1.7L VTEC

I’ve been having issues with parasitic drain, found the source of the drain to be something in the ABS system (diagnosed by connecting a multimeter to the negative battery terminal and connector, and unplugging fuses until the ~100mA drain went down to zero). The main culprit was the ABS motor fuse (this made sense, because the ABS light had recently turned on).

To get a sense for where to start, I had the ABS codes scanned. Initially we got back two codes: 15-1 Right Rear Wheel Speed Sensor Open Circuit, and 54-1 Fail Safe Relay Failure. However, we turned the car off and on again, and the relay failure code went away, while the sensor open circuit code remained.

Based on this, I suspected the sensor had failed, so I first measured the resistance to check whether there is an open circuit in the sensor. However, the resistance reading across the last connector before the sensor was ~1.5kOhm, which from what I’ve found on the internet is the normal operating resistance.

This tells me that the sensor is probably fine, and the problem happens somewhere in the circuit before the connection I checked. Youtube served me well up until this point, but I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out what things to check next. I’d like to try measuring the resistance across that sensor circuit coming out of the ABS control module, but I can’t find any videos or instructions for safely trouble shooting that connector, or even a pin map for the cable going into the connector. Any help would be much appreciated!

11 posts - 6 participants