Twisted CV Boot - Spot Check

Hey Tacomaworld,

Was cruising along a pretty tame forest road when my check engine and TRAC OFF lights came on so I headed back home. Once I stopped I found the passenger side CV boot in the mangled state depicted below.

Some searching has led me to threads having to do with this boot being torn, burst, and leaky for various reasons, but this sort of twisting seems uncommon (especially w/ the indicator lights coming on at the same time) and some have suggested it is an indicator of something else busted in cv axle assembly.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Should I be considering this unsafe to drive to the shop?

I should mention that a couple weeks prior I was sideswiped on the driver side. The collision sent quite a bit of force to the driver's side wheel, breaking the rim and throwing off my alignment. Repairs were made at collision center. I thought it unlikely that this was related, but I'm sure one of you knows much better to me whether the force of the impact could have gone through the differential causing damage to the CV axle on the passenger side.

Thanks for taking the time...

 

I could be wrong, but I'm gonna take a wild guess that a sloppy flatbed driver hooked a J hook on the lower control arm and the tip of the hook tore the boot. If that's the case, he would have known it afterwards, as the hook would have had grease all over it. Also, the guy doing the alignment should have noticed the torn boot.

Regardless of how the boot got torn, that would not make the check engine light come on.

 

Is that axle sheared off in the tulip? What happens when you put it in 4wd?

 

@whatstcp - No code reader at the moment, going to pick one up later and will post up what I find.

@Muddinfun - That is a solid reconstruction, but the sloppy truck actually hit me on the opposite side, so only way that collision could be relevant is if it were possible that force applied to my driver side wheel could have somehow damaged the passenger side CV joint through some feat of mechanical dominos.

@b_r_o - I got no complaints or unusual behavior with it in 4wd. I didn't put the 4wd to the test or anything to verify functionality, but I didn't get any indicators of malfunction and it seemed to drive normal.

 

I meant when your truck was towed from the accident scene on the back of a flatbed truck.

 

@Muddinfun - Ah yea my mistake, that is a possibility, but the collision center that worked on it would have had to have seen that while doing repairs (one would hope)

 

I’ve seen small tears in boots look invisible until stressed at certain angles.

But I agree with above ^ Torn boot would not cause lights, so I find it more likely that something caused CEL, and torn boot is one symptom of a bigger problem.

 

You would hope somebody noticed it, but maybe not, since it's not on the side that was hit. Or it's possible that someone noticed it and decided it wasn't accident related.

 

Hmm, Got a code reader hooked up and the error code I'm getting is P0022 which googles to something having to do with incorrect cam positioning. May be unrelated to the CV boot.