P0E3E: Control Pilot Indicator Control Circuit High
What to do
Charging still works — confirm it through the car's app or dashboard rather than the port lights. If a scan has also shown a related indicator code with a very different number, it is probably the same fault rather than two.
What this code means
The control circuit for a charging indicator is higher than its limit.
This code completes a family that the standard scattered across two blocks, and that scattering is the defining feature of P0Exx.
The Circuit/Open member of this family lives hundreds of numbers away, written when the earlier block was laid out; the Low and High members are here, added later when the standard came back and filled in the variants it had not allocated. One family, two addresses, no marker in either place saying so.
The practical consequence is a scan tool listing two codes that look unrelated and are the same fault, and a technician chasing the second one after fixing the first. The corpus cross-links them for exactly that reason — it is the kind of connection a reference work can make and a code list cannot.
What the indicator itself does is written at its base code, and nothing here changes it. Charging is unaffected; the lamp reporting on it is not.
See P0E3D for the three addresses this one family occupies.
At or above the upper limit, usually an open circuit or a short to supply.
Likely causes
Start here
- Control module driver failure · specialist
- Open circuit in control wiring · specialist
- Corroded or loose connector · specialist
Less common
- Damaged wiring harness · specialist
- Blown fuse or failed supply · easy
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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