Disabling TCS, VDC, and ABS for performance driving

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VitaminJ

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 3, 2017
Messages
397
Location
Morrison, CO
This should go without saying but: DO THE FOLLOWING AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Over the weekend I entered an autocross with my 2013 Nissan Leaf. I had seen posts over the years of other people autocrossing their Leafs and read all of their experiences. The #1 thing that kept popping out at me was the very intrusive stability control system which will intervene during "spirited" driving and cut power to the front wheels, or apply brakes to one or more wheels to straighten out a sliding car.

The Leaf has a button which turns off TCS (Traction Control System) but this only applies for straight-line driving. As soon as steering angle is put into the car, the TCS comes on and pulls power when it senses a spinning tire. VDC (Vehicle Dynamic Control) is on 100% of the time and cannot be disengaged by the driver. VDC uses the ABS hardware to pulse each wheel in order to maintain "stability," this means when the Leaf starts getting into a drift the VDC will stop it.

Anyone who knows about performance driving knows that these systems severely limit the driver's ability to drive fast around corners. For years driver's have found ways of disabling factory electronic driving aids and I sought to do the same to my Leaf.

I went through every fuse box in whole car and found all fuses for ABS or VDC, there turned out only to be 3 of them. Please see the photos below for their locations.

After disabling the systems the car drove normally in every way except for having a bunch of warning lights on the dash. Of course it also disabled all 3 electronic systems and the Leaf could be thrown around like any other FWD hatchback. During autocrossing my wife and I experienced spinning tires with full motor power on corner exits, locking up all 4 wheels in smokey slides, lift-off oversteer on corner entry, and all of the other fun stuff cars can do when you let them!

Naturally, the process is completely reversible, just reinsert the fuses where they came from.


I have created another thread for my autocross experience here and I will be posting some video from the event there.

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i had no idea my leaf had stability control. cool. I'm driving miss daisy most commutes so I wouldn't notice. only time I have fun is when I think that I'd rather just get enough ahead of someone so that I don't have to be rude when I want that nice hole in front of them.
 
nice, good to know. from my playing around the TCS kicks in even when you disable it, allows about a 2 second burnout before it cuts power. good to know when i want to hoon i can pull those.
 
So far stats are about the same, they have been steadily getting better as the weather has cooled off anyway. IIRC I'm at about 57Ah. It was a chilly morning only had 4 temp bars and at the end of the day I had 5 but the ambient temperature climbed a bit too.

Over the 10 runs we had the car averaged 1.5 mi/kwh and we covered 10 miles total including rolling back to the paddock and ended with 50% charge :mrgreen:
 
It would be interesting to see if there is a way to unlock some of the motors untapped power without hardware mods. The guy who swapped a leaf motor into a CRX was able to get 302hp out of the motor with a custom controller.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLCc7bSLNjs
 
piro who made and sells the Leaf Box said he was able to increase the output power of the car slightly but feared it would damage the battery pulling that much more current. I would love to be able to get more power maybe in the future we will have aftermarket batteries that can deliver the power.

ElectricEddy is that your CRX? Otherwise he's your neighbor in Nanaimo, small world!
 
that is great news, thank you, an old thread but exactly what I wanted to know. I had heard that disconnecting the ABS caused limp home mode, anyone had that?
 
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