P0D23: Battery Charger A Output Shorted
Do not keep driving
Do not charge the car again until it has been inspected. Unplug it and leave it unplugged. The car may still drive, but a short on the high-voltage side can start a fire and cannot be assessed without proper equipment — arrange recovery to a shop equipped for high-voltage work rather than driving it there.
What this code means
The on-board charger has detected a short circuit on its high voltage output.
This is the one code in the family that means stop. Every other fault here describes a charge that is slow, incomplete or unreliable. This one describes a fault path on a conductor that the charger was about to push several hundred volts of direct current into, and the charger has refused.
A short on the high voltage side is not like a short on the 12-volt side. A traction pack can deliver enough current to vaporise metal and start a fire, and it has no ignition switch to turn off — it is live whenever the contactors are closed and it stores energy even when they are open. The car is designed to be isolated from its own chassis (the argument is at P0D0E), and a short is precisely the failure of that design.
Do not attempt to clear this and try again. The realistic causes are a damaged high voltage cable, water where it should not be, or accident damage — and all three are worse the second time. This is a code to have recovered rather than driven, even though the car may well still move.
Likely causes
Start here
- Damaged high voltage cable insulation · specialist
- Accident damage to high voltage components · specialist
- Water ingress into connector · specialist
- Faulty on-board charger · specialist
Less common
- Damaged charging inlet or pins · specialist
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
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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