Another interesting failure on a 2020 d110 p400 with 68k miles on it. After a day of trail riding , he was parallel parking at the hotel and heard a bang! The defender then lost all of his coolant. Also noticed that the steering was hard to turn. Luckily, this failure didn't happen on the 15 min drive on public roads from the trails to the hotel. Turns out the tabs that bolt the steering rack down to the subframe broke off of the casting! What a catastrophic failure. Currently we have removed the steering rack and are looking to add 2 more mounting points from the rack to the subframe to help spread the load. Also looking to add reinforcement to put the original mounts in a double shear using steel. Here are some photos

 

Wow! Thanks for sharing. I'm not Engineer, but it's hard to imagine that would have broken due to hard use without a lot of other carnage to the wheel, etc. So, in my uneducated opinion - it's gotta be a manufacturing flaw. Would love to find out "the rest of the story" as Paul Harvey would say.

 

What caused the coolant loss? Did any of the steering components hit a coolant line?

 

Correct. The rack hit the lower radiator hose

 

Good to know. It looks like the part # for the rack has been superseded 4 times since production began. Wonder if that is just from a supplier change or if there are reinforcements in that area on the newer ones. Curious to see if there's a difference if the customer orders a new one!

 

Ok. NOT confidence inspiring. Even if the guy had 44" tires and was rock crawling every day since picking the vehicle up. WTF!
Are you in touch with JLR NA? I'd love to hear what they have to say.

 

Note the slight corrosion on the threads of the retaining bolt.

Something else is going on here other than sudden failure. Perhaps the joint cracks, water gets in, slight corrosion happens and then it fails fully... but it does seem odd that the bolt would be corroded inside of the aluminum rack mount, doesn't it?

This would lead me to believe these crack, then hang on for a while, and then eventually fail ...

Either way super interesting finding here from the Jedi master Sarek

 

I do think if this were truly a widespread problem we’d see more reports of it by now, but it’s concerning nonetheless. Curious if the underlying symptoms are identifiable prior to it happening and present on more vehicles. It could certainly be an isolated failure. If not, this seems like it could be a serious safety issue and warrants attention from JLR.

it’s also important to consider this person was (per the Facebook post):
a) running lift rods
b) had larger tires
c) reportedly driving hard on the gas off-road

im no engineer but it’s hard to disqualify the sum of the parts here with respect to the end result

 

for what it’s worth, I noticed a bit of this same corrosion on bolts when installing my rear tow eyes. It seemed to be surface level which I would think is normal.

 

I suspect relatively few people are wheeling their L663's the way Sarek and his friends are. Hehe. In my experience, you wheel any truck with mostly factory bits hard enough and you WILL break stuff. You gotta pay to play! For example, the Bronco's are destroying steering racks at a pretty good clip and Ford just announced a Severe Duty rack as a replacement!

https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/f...t-for-broncos/

Chris