U0156: Lost Communication With Information Centre A
What to do
The information display has gone blank or dead, and the car is entirely safe to drive.
There is a silver lining worth knowing: a blank screen is much better than a screen showing wrong numbers. A blank one tells you not to rely on it; a plausible-looking wrong figure does not. So this is a nuisance rather than a hazard.
Until it is fixed: fill up on the fuel gauge and the trip meter rather than the range readout, and check tyre pressures with a proper gauge. You have also lost any written warning or service message the car would normally show, so a fault elsewhere may now announce itself only as a symbol.
One thing to insist on if the unit has to be replaced. On many cars this module stores your recorded mileage. A second-hand one carries the mileage of the car it came out of, which is both a technical problem and, in most countries, a legal one. Any replacement must be programmed to your car with the correct figure, and you should be given documentation.
Check first whether the speedometer and other gauges still work. If they have gone too, the fault is more likely the instrument cluster itself.
What this code means
The driver information centre has stopped being heard from. The general reasoning is at U0100, and U0457 explains what this display is and why it measures nothing.
This is one of the few places in the corpus where silence is clearly the better failure, and saying so is the useful content.
U0457's whole argument is that a display showing a plausible wrong number is a hazard, because the driver acts on it — a range figure, a tyre pressure, an ice warning. A blank or dead display cannot mislead anybody. It is a nuisance, and it is honest.
So the practical instruction is short: use the gauges, fill up on the fuel gauge and the trip meter, and check tyre pressures with a proper gauge. Nothing here affects how the vehicle drives, and there is no urgency beyond losing the service and warning messages that would normally be written out in words.
One thing does deserve care, and it is expensive to get wrong. On many vehicles the recorded mileage is stored in this module rather than only in the engine module, so a second-hand replacement brings another vehicle's odometer reading with it. In most jurisdictions that is a legal matter as well as a technical one. Any replacement must be programmed to the vehicle with the correct figure, and the work documented.
Where the fault usually is: this module shares its supply and its bus connection with the instrument cluster on many designs, so the first question is whether the gauges still work. If they do not, U0155 is the better page and this code is downstream of it.
Likely causes
Start here
- Blown fuse or failed supply · easy
- Corroded or loose connector · easy
- Failed power or earth supply to the module · moderate
- Damaged data bus wiring · moderate
Less common
- Failed instrument cluster · specialist
- Second hand module locked to another vehicle · 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
Be the first to write this up
Nothing posted about this yet. Whatever you found is worth writing down — even a dead end saves someone the same afternoon.
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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