Twice now, when my son has gotten in his 2001 Discovery to drive to school in the morning, the instrument cluster has been dead. Both times the weather was in the 30 degree Fahrenheit range. When the vehicle gets warmed up by the heater, 10 min after driving down the road, the instruments start working again.

None of the dash lights (except the SRS light) come on at startup. Once the vehicle is warmed up it all works fine. When the next several days the temps stayed in the 40's everything worked properly. Then it dipped again and it happened a second time.

We're headed into Winter here so we are getting more and more cold days. They will be the norm for several months.

He has an Ultragauge so can get some instrument information data.

The vehicle runs properly during and after the incidents.

Looking at instrument failure posts from the past, I see references to bad grounds/earth, conector issues in C0051 near the driver pedal area, fuses (0 & 14 under the bonnet. 25, 27, 35 under dash panel), loose pins in the instrument wiring harness connector, issues with fuel pump, chaffed tail light wires, clock harness wire short to ground. Lots to look at... I don't see how they are all related - I think I need the wiring diagram for this circuit...

It acts like an intermittent failure from a cold solder joint...

Is there more structured troubleshooting process that I could follow? I'm reasonably handy with a multimeter, have worked on cars for decades, and was a computer programmer for a long time, so get structured debugging.

Side note, we have a spare dash cluster from a parts D2 that we could plug in, but I don't just like throwing parts at things without knowing why.

Anyone had this issue and fixed it?

 

This is not something I've encountered on a Disco2. But whenever I have random interior electrical issues on a D2 I suspect... water ingress.

That said, I'd swap in the spare cluster as a start (make sure you use from similar year... ie 99-02 or 03-04, they don't swap 100% of the time, the fuel/gas gauges can peg or operate in opposite directions if you swap facelift to non, or vice versa).. Anyway, It's an easy swap and takes 10 mins.

My sense would be water corrosion on interior fusebox perhaps as well. Or water ingress-related corrosion on passenger ECU's / harnesses.

 

Is the water ingress thought that freezing would cause something to separate that then melts and allows good contact again?

I also have a spare fuse/relay panel from the same parts vehicle. The parts rig was also a 2001.

 

No, I don't think it's a freezing of liquid to solid and back, to answer your question. But I think you're onto something with cold solder joint failure, etc. My experience is that once the fuse box gets wet, and corrodes (easy to see if you remove fusebox and poke around on the bottom of it, usually blueish corrosion trails coming out of the seams, Disco2's act possessed. Purely nonsensical things happen that are impossible to trace through normal means.

 

Thank you! That gives me some leads to poke into.

 

I had this problem as well. Below 50* F my instrument cluster didn't work. I tried a new fuse box, resoldering dash plug inputs, redoing grounds, ect. I tested my theory by taking the dash out, putting a hair dryer to it and then voila it would work.

I ended up getting a used dash. Make sure you get a dash with the same part number and lower mileage than your vehicle. The new dash will blink the mileage stored in that dash until you sync the new dash and the bcm via a T4 or similar.

Hope this helps someone as it took me months of fiddling to figure this all out.