U0031: Vehicle Communication Bus A (+) Low
What to do
Expect a group of systems to have stopped working together. A network wire is being held down by a short to the bodywork, so messages cannot get through.
Two things are worth telling the garage.
Has anything been fitted to the car — a tracker, dashcam, alarm, stereo, tow bar or insurance box? An earth connection added beside the network wires, or a screw through the loom, causes a lot of these, and unplugging the device to re-test is far quicker than stripping trim.
And did the fault come and go before becoming permanent? That is typical of a wire rubbing through against bodywork, and it tells a technician to move the loom by hand rather than reach for a meter.
Do not let computers be replaced on the strength of the long fault list — they are almost certainly all fine, and are simply reporting that they cannot hear each other.
What this code means
The positive line of vehicle communication bus A is being held low. See U0004 for the short-to-earth argument and the voltage signature, and U0028 for identifying the bus first.
The voltage test is the one that survives not knowing which network this is, and that is worth saying because everything else on a lettered bus depends on identification.
Resistance figures vary between networks; the shape of a differential signal does not. Both conductors idling at the same voltage and moving symmetrically is what every one of these buses does, whatever its speed. So a conductor sitting at zero and not moving is shorted to earth on any of them — and that can be established before the network has been named.
Where the short is follows U0004: a conductor chafed through against the body, a bracket or a panel edge, which is why the fault often follows the loom's route rather than any component, and why moving the harness by hand finds it faster than a meter when it is currently present.
And an aftermarket earth taken beside the pair remains worth eliminating first, because unplugging a device is quicker than stripping trim.
Likely causes
Start here
- Wiring shorted to ground · moderate
- Damaged data bus wiring · moderate
- Poor wiring splice in an aftermarket installation · moderate
- Damaged wiring harness · moderate
Less common
- Water ingress into connector · moderate
- Another module holding the bus down · 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.
- What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.
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