P0D5D: Battery Charger Hybrid/EV System Discharge Time Too Short
What to do
The car will usually drive and charge. It is a high-voltage fault and belongs in a properly equipped shop — the circuit involved is the one that makes the system safe to work on, so it should be repaired before any other high-voltage work is done.
What this code means
The charging system's high voltage capacitors discharged faster than expected after the charging contactors opened.
Every high-voltage assembly on the car has to be able to make itself safe, and it does so by dumping the energy stored in its capacitors through a bleed resistor the moment it is disconnected. A defined discharge time is how the car proves that happened.
Too short means the energy went somewhere faster than the bleed resistor can account for, and the two ways that happens are both faults: a leakage path that should not exist — insulation breaking down, moisture, a partially shorted component — or a bleed circuit that has failed short rather than open.
It is the less dangerous of the pair, because it errs toward the capacitors being empty. P0D5E is the one that errs the other way, and that one matters more.
Likely causes
Start here
- Failed high voltage discharge circuit · specialist
Less common
- Damaged high voltage cable insulation · specialist
- Water ingress into connector · specialist
- Faulty on-board charger · specialist
- Corroded or loose connector · 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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What makes one worth reading:
- The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
- What you measured, not only what you replaced.
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