C0062: Longitudinal Acceleration Sensor
What to do
The ordinary brakes are unaffected — what has switched off is the system that catches a skid for you. The car will feel completely normal until the moment it would have intervened, which is exactly when you will not want it missing. Drive gently in the wet and cold and get it diagnosed.
What this code means
The longitudinal acceleration sensor circuit has a fault.
Stability control needs to know what the car is actually doing, not just what the wheels are doing.
The wheel speed sensors say how fast each wheel turns. The steering angle sensor says where the driver is pointing. The inertial sensors say how the body is really moving — yaw is rotation about the vertical axis, lateral acceleration is the sideways push, longitudinal is braking and accelerating, roll is lean.
Stability control is the comparison between the two. If the driver is asking for a curve the car is not following, the system brakes individual wheels — and sometimes cuts engine torque — to rotate the car back onto the intended path. It cannot make that comparison with a sensor missing, so it shuts down rather than act on a partial picture.
Longitudinal acceleration measures braking and accelerating along the car's length. It matters most on hills and on four-wheel-drive vehicles: it lets the module tell a wheel slowed by braking from one slowed by a gradient, and it is what makes hill-hold and hill-descent control possible.
These sensors are almost always inside one module, not scattered around the car, usually mounted low and near the centre where the motion is cleanest. So a fault naming one axis often means the whole assembly, and it is worth reading every stored code before ordering a part.
Two causes are specific to this kind of sensor and easy to miss. It must be mounted rigidly and the right way up — a module disturbed, loosened or refitted at an angle reads real motion incorrectly, and an accident repair or seat removal is a common way for that to happen. And many need calibrating at rest, which requires the car standing still on level ground; a calibration attempted on a slope teaches it a lie.
The most important thing first: the car still stops.
ABS, traction control and stability control are all additions to a braking system that works without them. When the module finds a fault it switches itself off and hands back a conventional, fully hydraulic brake system — the pedal, the master cylinder, the lines and the calipers are untouched. You have not lost your brakes.
What you have lost is the help. Without ABS the wheels can lock under hard braking, which lengthens the stopping distance on a slippery surface and — the part people forget — takes away your ability to steer while braking hard, because a locked wheel cannot generate cornering force. Without stability control the car will not catch a slide for you.
So drive it, but drive it as though it were forty years old: brake earlier, leave more room, and be especially careful in rain, snow and on gravel.
Likely causes
Start here
- Faulty yaw rate or acceleration sensor · specialist
- Corroded or loose connector · specialist
Less common
- Sensor calibration not performed after repair · moderate
- Sensor module loose or incorrectly mounted · specialist
- Damaged wiring harness · specialist
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
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Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Community experience
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