Bit lengthy this one but hopefully the information may help somebody. about a week back I got the holy trinity of abs fault, cruise not available and DSC not available flashing up on the dash. My old code reader could only read ECU codes so I ordered an icarsoft i930 and carried on driving the car. A few days later the 3 codes were joined with an engine code, which I could now read with my old standard reader. The code related to the right rear ABS sensor or it's wiring. Aha, I thought all I need to do now is to swap the two rear sensors over, clear the code and wait for it to come back so I can see if I now get a new code that refers to the other side. Fortunately as I was doing the swap my shiney new reader arrived. Anyways, the swap was completed and I took the car for a test drive. Sure enough after 100 yards the fault came back but this time the code was for the other side so I knew the sensor was at fault. What happened next was disturbing. I pulled out of a junction and instead of the car going from second to third gear I got a huge lurch and a gearbox fault message. The car would now only go in to 1st or 2nd. It seemed too much of a coincidence that it happened after I had been messing about so I switched the 2 sensors back. The gearbox is fine again, I have the original fault code back. I can only assume that the box relies on the left rear wheel sensor in some way but don't really know why that should be. I am now waiting for a new sensor and just hope that I haven't hurt the tranny in any way.
1/2er

 

The sensors report the car speed. With weird values anything bad can happen, such as bad gear changes.

 

I had this exact same issue last year, including the horrible lurch and gearbox fault message. I honestly thought the tranny had died but thankfully a new ABS sensor fixed everything so you should be fine.

You wouldn't think something that minor could screw up so many things but apparently so!

 

It is weird, the thing that bugs me the most is the gearbox issue only happened if the bad sensor was on the left rear, on the right rear I got the other errors but no 'box errors. I have had my 3 things in a month now, hopefully nothing else will go wrong for a while.
1/2er