G’day folks,
Well, for a few months now I have been trying to track down this problem with the Prado.

For those who don’t know, torque steer causes the vehicle to steer to one direction on acceleration and back the other when the foot is removed from the accelerator.

The Prado was continually pulling to the right under acceleration, to the left when backing off and straight ahead the rest of the time.

The boys at work checked all the front and rear suspension bushes, but they looked reasonable. None had too much movement when tested and none seemed to be split or cracked in any way.

The only thing to do was to start replacing things one by one until the problem is found.

First the left hand upper rear track rod was replaced as bushes are not sold separately. This helped a little.
Next the right hand upper rear track rod was replaced. Again another slight improvement.

And yesterday I replaced the the four bushes in the two rear lower trailing arms. This has made the biggest difference.

When the trailing arms were removed, the bushes were inspected and to the eye they looked like perfectly good ones. However, over time the rubber had become soft, which was allowing too much rear axle movement on acceleration and back off.

So I will now start to look at replacing the front bushes.

Email: info@4x4galore.com
Author – Doug Johnston

Differences Between 4WD and 2WD The first difference you will notice is that the 4WD has far greater ground clearance than a 2WD. Some 4WD's have what are called free wheeling hubs fitted to the centre of the front wheels. These hubs can be either manual, where there is a knob to be turned, automatic, where once in 4WD the hubs lock automatically or a combination of both. The idea of free wheeling hubs is to disconnect the front diff and axles from the wheel, so when traveling on highway, the vehicle doesn't have to use extra power turning these when they are not wanted.