And Ignition Key of Range Rover Wont Turn!!

We planed a road trip to Wales during the long “Easter” weekend. Since we will be packing up soon, so Aarti wants to make sure that i see every beautiful part of UK before we leave (that’s what happens when your wife is in Travel & Tourism, and thank god for that :-D).

Since it was a 4 day weekend, we decided to let go 3 days on this trip and relax the final day. The route finalized was as seen below:

When we came out of “Conwy Castle” and got into our RR, the key once inserted wont turn 😮

I took out the key from ignition and tried again but the key wont turn more than 5 degrees. What could be the cause, my mind could think of only these:

1. Car battery ran out.
2. Key battery ran out.

But then when i clicked on the radio and it was working fine and i was able to lock/unlock RR using the key, both of these options went out of the window.

It was late in the evening and a Saturday, since we had roadside assistance so tried calling them. They could not confirm our subscription but still were willing to help but that meant we had to cut short our trip and go back with the truck towing our RR.

We were lucky to find one great family who were leaving from the parking lot in their brand new Honda CRV, we asked them if they wont mind giving our RR a CPR using their CRV. They happliy agreed but that did not make the key turn further.

As a final resort i checked with Google, and found what might be the root cause and also some tips which i thought i must try.
Possible Root Cause:

1. Failure of the Steering Lock ECU. Steering lock ECU has a physical locking bolt driven by a motor and cam-assembly that engages or disengages with the steering columns main shaft, this bolt can be sticking.

Possible Solutions:

1. Complete steering column and ignition switch replacement (GBP 2000.00 appox).
2. Disconnect the battery negative for 10 minutes and reconnect, the key will turn and car will start but you will have to do this everytime you want to start the car hereafter.
3. From one of the forums, a member called “BBS Guy” shared his experience and a possible cheap solution which had worked for another RR. Here is the link to the original post and pics of documents he shared as below. Full credits to him for the great work.

Only solution that we could try (stranded in the parking lot of Conwy Castle) was No. 2, i tried removing the negative and waited for 10 minutes but the key (which was still inserted in the slot) dint turn. So i tried removing the key and then disconnecting the negative for 10 mins, nothing 😐

We then almost had made our mind made to get towed all the way back to London, and thought of trying for the last time. This time i disconnected both the negative and positive, waited for 10 mins and tried .. “Eureka” .. RR was back to life. Me and my wife looked at each other, smiled, and continued to our resting place for the day.

Once we reached our destination, i wanted to see if i will be able to start the RR normally or i will have to follow the procedure every time till the root cause was fixed. To my surprise, when i tried yanking it again, it started as normally it always did in the past. And ever since we did not see this issue coming up again (thanks to Shiv Ji for that).

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