Garage charges

[Cobbler]

A friend has a new Vivaro van with a factory fitted to bar, the spec says will not work with LED lights, we tried it & it upset all the electrics, seems a bit odd in this day & age when so much has LED lights.

 

[Kayos]

I know the later freelanders use a plug on the electrics, however nothing works until it’s plugged into the diagnostic and activated

£3k sounds steep but on a modern car with can bus, adaptive suspension, electronic brake distribution, stability control etc etc etc it may be more than bolting the bar up and connecting some wires. The tow bar wiring may even have an ecu to communicate with all the other systems (that’s a guess if I’m honest but wouldn’t surprise me)

 

[jordan1]

Land Rover fit a tow hitch that deploys at the touch of a button now - link

Lot more hi-tech and much cheaper, still a lot for a tow bar.

 

[R-D-R]

Got an order in for my next Land Rover, factory fit deployable towbar was £900 on the build - same towbar retrofit by the dealer after over £2k. mainly because of the amount of taking apart they have to do.

 

[Nick67GT]

[QUOTE="anto44, post: 1187740, member:
On a side note has anyone driven a vehicle with trailer mode active?[/QUOTE]

I had a factory fitted retractable tow bar built into my Q3 which cost me £600. It lives behind a removable panel under the rear bumper and is deployed by a clever device in the boot which allows it to swing down and lock into position.

When the trailer electiics are hooked up it locks the transmission into D mode and won't let you select E (economy) or Sport.

 

[anto44]

[QUOTE="anto44, post: 1187740, member:
On a side note has anyone driven a vehicle with trailer mode active?

I had a factory fitted retractable tow bar built into my Q3 which cost me £600. It lives behind a removable panel under the rear bumper and is deployed by a clever device in the boot which allows it to swing down and lock into position.

When the trailer electiics are hooked up it locks the transmission into D mode and won't let you select E (economy) or Sport.[/QUOTE]
I got to drive one doing dealer training on a track and was encouraged (not that I needed much encouragement) to drive one very aggressively to see how the traction and braking systems responded to account for the trailer. It's quite impressive.

 

[sako243]

Also, some now retract etc, don't know if the £3k price was for one of those?

Cars in general now are so hugely complicated with Canbus etc and have, frankly, too many 'toys' but we have become blase about having them. Iirc, the latest BMWs [and doubtless other marques] have moved on the the next generation of wiring systems [the name of which escapes me for the moment ] but it's progress and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Quotes like these are the price we pay.

As @anto44 says, there is much 'behind the scenes' which the 'average punter' [not a dig at the OP] is completely unaware of until it impacts on the wallet.

They still use CANBUS because it's kind of what it was designed for! What you may be thinking of is MOST which is used for the infotainment system and not safety critical stuff (although still has ridiculous levels of safety stuff built in). My RR has a POF (Plastic Optical Fibre) based one but all the critical ECUs are CANBUS with bridges to the MOST network if required. There's also LIN bus which is a slower and simpler protocol than CANBUS mainly for connecting sensors to ECUs than ECU to ECU.

Keeping on topic I fitted a genuine Westfalia towbar to my fatty which was a couple of hundred compared to Land Rover supplying the same kit for circa £800. Plug and play. The towing ECU detects the trailer and disables the rear parking sensors as well as remapping the engine and gearbox to hold gears for longer.

 

[R-D-R]

I swapped the tow wiring harness over myself from my first Discovery 3 to the second and then again over to my first Discovery 4 but with the current one we had to go dealer fit on delivery as it was more complex due to the Radar panels, cameras and something else I cant remember being buried behind the rear bumper. They also had to do something with the Sonar sensors for the Wade sensing no idea why was dead simple in the previous models plug and play. They then had it in 3 times after delivery as the car wouldn't calibrate the trailer properly through the cameras no matter where we stuck the guidance sticker on the trailer.