Rear drive shaft catasthropic failure

99.9% of motorist go thru their entire driving history and they never ever experience a drive shaft failure. That’s because its a component that never ever fails. For a drive shaft coupling to degrade like so…

Something drastic must have happened. In my case. I cannot for the life of me recall. That’s not unusual. As my 4X4 has to regularly transverse very challeging terrain…so its not surprisingly that maybe I banged a rock or came down really hard on the joint.

Besides there were plenty of abnormal signs before this failure. The car jerked on a gear shift and at the latter stage when the problem crept to chronic, there was even a noticeable vibration when cruising…..so there were plenty of warnings.

But i didnt heed it as I thought it was something else.

I should have conducted a visual check. I will do that next time. In this case i was very lucky. As the shaft dropped off when I was tailing the worlds slowest lorry. Had it dropped off at high speed….it would have been a different story.