U0190 Low Generic / SAE

U0190: Lost Communication With Digital Disc Player/Changer Module D

Network and Communication Lost Communication

What to do

The car drives entirely normally. This is a fourth disc player, which effectively means a rear-seat entertainment system with a screen and player for each passenger.

Start with whether your car actually has one. These were expensive options, and if any of the entertainment equipment has been replaced with a second-hand unit from a better-equipped car, your car may now be looking for modules it never had.

One thing worth telling the garage: if several disc player faults are stored together, that is much more likely to be one coding mistake than several broken units. Ask for the configuration to be checked before anybody removes a trim panel — it is a five-minute check that can save an afternoon.

If the equipment is genuinely fitted, this is still worth attending to even if nobody uses it: a module that has stopped answering can keep the car awake after you lock it and flatten the battery over a few days. Ask whether it can be properly coded out rather than left complaining — but it must be done properly, not by unplugging it.

What this code means

A fourth disc player module has stopped being heard from. See U0187 for why a device nobody uses is still worth attending to, and U0491 for the same module reporting implausibly instead.

Four disc players on one vehicle means a rear-seat entertainment system with independent screens — each with its own player, so that two passengers could watch different things. A configuration found on large vehicles from a particular era and essentially nowhere since.

Which makes the U0188 question the first one and the most likely answer: is the module fitted at all? These were expensive options on a shared loom, and second-hand infotainment components bring the donor vehicle's configuration with them — so a vehicle told it has four players when it has one reports the missing three permanently, with nothing to find on any of them.

A useful corollary: several disc player codes stored together are much more likely to be one coding error than several failed modules. If U0187 through U0190 are all present, check the configuration before opening a single trim panel.

Where the equipment does exist, everything at U0187 applies — the network-awake argument, the water in the boot side panels, the stuck disc, and the option of decommissioning a redundant player properly rather than unplugging it.

Likely causes

Start here

Module not coded to the vehicle · specialist
Corroded or loose connector · easy
Water ingress into module · moderate

Less common

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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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.