New Years Day. I take my 2016 RT to meet the other riders for the annual ride. Runs good to the lodge. Turn it off for ten minutes to take photos of the club. Start it up again to warm up while putting on helmet, gloves etc.
Put it in gear and whoa, the steering is really weird. Stop, look at the tires, all good. Ride another half mile with considerable under and overseer and quite hard at that. I go home, figure the electric power steering just crapped out.
So, any ideas where to look? I've owned it since new, I figure 9 winters riding, this is a first.
Without BUDS, there's not a whole lot that you can do at home to find and correct the root cause, but there are some things you can check that will give you an idea of which way this is going to go.
For example, if you have a typical, finished concrete garage floor, go out to the bike, get on and start it up, and cycle your handlebars fully from left to right a few times. Once you get the feel of the level of effort involved, keep cycling the handlebars, then just as you start a swing from one side to the other, hit the kill switch and kill the motor. If you notice a distinct increase in level of effort and loss of assist, then everything is working. If not, then it's probably a failure of the DPS motor. However, first, what you can check is that J-Case, 40 amp fuse in the left fuse box. I think it's number 3, but check your owners guide.
If it
DOES seem like it is working, then history has shown that voltage issues are most common in causing DPS issues. It
IS a power hog. So, cleaning and tightening your battery cable terminal connections, as well as determining your battery health and replacing the battery if required, has been shown to correct DPS performance issues. The system is designed to reduce assist as the voltage that it sees drops below 12v. And depending on the amount of assist that is being called for, the thing can easily draw 25 to 30 amps. A high resistance battery connection has been known to cause issues, because it momentarily drops voltage when the DPS asks for high amps.
How cold was it? The DPS system will also shutdown on you if the board temperature falls below 14*F. It was below that here in NEO.
So, good luck with it. A replacement DPS motor is pretty expensive. The Torque Sensor cannot be replaced separately without replacing the entire unit, although the Steering Angle Sensor can be. If you run out of things that you can do at home, it's dealer time.
