How to completely disable the VDC

DrivenSoul

I helped my friend who has a 370Z disable his VDC. It was difficult to find much info on how to do it, but I helped a friend with a 350Z do it before and figured it should be pretty similar.

You can ALMOST reach it if you take off the cupholder, but removing the center console seems to be the only way to go. The VDC controller will come into plain view as soon as the console comes off. I wanted to make a switch to deactivate it anytime without going through the whole console removal again, so I had to pick a wire to cut and test.. There is a black wire which I assume is ground and it works well for what I intended.

When you use the switch, the sliding car symbol will light up steadily but the VDC light will not. I do not know if it affects anything, but we also disengage the normal traction control button in conjunction, lighting up the "VDC off" light. That light does not turn on when we use our new switch.

Perceived differences:

With the 350Z, it seems like throttle response for some reason is much more touchy with the full disengagement of VDC. It's difficult to rev-match because just slightly touching the gas pedal will shoot revs up instantly and abundantly. For the 370, I didn't see the same results.

Fast cornering was pretty scary with the 370Z before. It's like you "think" everything is off because you push the switch, but the car doesn't feel normal. It never sinks into oversteer or understeer, it feels like it just keeps turning. While this sounds like a good thing, it made me feel nervous because I didn't know how the car would react if I ever went past that threshold.

I've had a couple instances of trying to play past the car's grip level and the car in return gave me awkward responses, for example I would try to get the car to start sliding, but a lot of times power is cut and I end up losing all momentum, or I get it to begin sliding and then suddenly the VDC kicks in and my correct amount of countersteer suddenly becomes me directing the car WAY off-line. With VDC fully off, the car does what I expect it to, it has power if I press down on the throttle and naturally slides if I provoke the rear end enough. It actually feels more confident and easy to drive with everything turned off. If I make a mistake, the car will show me instead of brushing it under the rug.

Anyways I just wanted to give my input and experience with it because I'm sure some people are curious about doing it. Don't worry... You're not going to crash unless you're doing something really really wrong!