I have had an issue before with my auto gearbox where I lost all drive. Gearbox was repaired and has been fine for around 50,000 miles. I am currently doing a fair bit of motorway mileage and on one of these journey's a couple of weeks ago I noticed a little i appear in the display and the message Transmission Fault. I was driving at 70 MPH with cruise control on and had just finished going up an incline, the gearbox dropped down a gear to keep momentum but never returned back to what I assume would be 6th. If I took my foot off the accelerator pedal I noticed the revs dropped to idle, there was no gear change down. When I came off the motorway and to a stop, the gearbox went back to normal and continued to do so. I had the fluid changed last Friday and all seemed OK until yesterday when the same thing happened. This morning I tried the command shift option and the box changes through the gears fine, even on the motorway, I can drop to 5th and then back to 6th no problem.
This would seem to suggest that the box is fine which leads me to think it could be electrical? Sensor maybe? How does the gearbox make it's own choices, on a P38 I had, there was a known issue with what they called the XYZ switch, does the Freelander have anything similar?

Also, would it be worth investing in the IID BT diagnostic tool, would this be able to read a gearbox fault if one is logged?

Have you the extra earth lead and a newish battery ? Also do the hard reset routine and see how it goes.

I got a really cheap code checker last year and the one thing its good for is clearing out basic 3 digit codes so if you have a load of old codes in there they need moving. A bit like my brain it no longer handles multiple tasks.  FL2 MY10 TD4 GS traded in at 2 years
FL2 MY13 TD4 GS Current

YB - what coder reader did you get?

Hi Bob, extra earth lead fitted fitted and new battery fitted last year also. Will try the hard reset over the weekend and see what happens. Ironically this is the 5th Land Rover I have owned and yet has so far been the least reliable

Suckfish wrote:

YB - what coder reader did you get?

Since posting, I have had the gearbox ECU fault codes read, seems there were quite a few so I suspect when the gearbox went wrong last year, the fault codes were not cleared. There was one code that mentioned an issue with one of the clutch solenoids which I suspect relates to the issue I was having. For now I have just had the codes cleared and will wait until the fault occurs again and have the fault codes re-read. I have covered just over 1,000 miles since the codes have been cleared and so far all is working OK so perhaps a combination of oil change and code clearing has resolved the issue for now, only time will tell