U0213: Lost Communication With Mirror Control Module A
What to do
The car drives normally. Expect the mirror's adjustment, heating and folding to stop working, and possibly its indicator repeater.
Two things worth knowing beyond the inconvenience. If your car has blind spot warning and the sensor is in the mirror, that warning may no longer be working — so check over your shoulder rather than relying on it. And if the mirror no longer folds, be careful in automatic car washes and narrow streets.
Mention any knock the mirror has taken, even a light one, and any time it has been folded back hard or the glass replaced. That disturbs the wiring and connectors inside the housing and is one of the commonest causes here.
Also mention a cracked mirror glass or damaged housing — rain gets straight into the electronics through either, and the damage is invisible until the mirror is taken apart.
Otherwise the wiring where it passes from the body into the door is the usual suspect, since everything reaching the mirror goes through there.
What this code means
The first mirror control module has stopped being heard from. See U0200 for the block's framing.
A door mirror stopped being a mirror some time ago, and that is why it has a module at all. A modern one may contain the adjustment motors, a heater element, a folding motor, a memory position, an indicator repeater, a puddle lamp, an auto-dimming element, a blind spot monitoring radar or antenna, and a camera for a surround-view system. The mirror module is the local hub for all of it.
The consequence is that losing it removes far more than mirror adjustment, and the affected list is worth predicting rather than discovering: heated mirrors that no longer demist, folding that stops working — which matters on a narrow street or in an automatic car wash — a dead indicator repeater, and on equipped vehicles the loss of blind spot warning or a quadrant of the surround-view image.
Blind spot monitoring is the one to flag. Where the sensor lives in the mirror, this code can take the warning system with it, and a driver used to relying on it should know it is not there. That is the same argument the corpus makes for the forward radar at P2583.
The dominant cause is the door harness boot described at U0200, since everything reaching the mirror passes through it. Impact damage is the close second and is specific to mirrors: a folded-back mirror after a knock, a clipped wing mirror in traffic, or a mirror glass replaced after vandalism all disturb the loom and the connectors inside the mirror housing.
Water gets in here too, and by a route peculiar to mirrors — a cracked mirror glass or a damaged housing lets rain directly into the electronics, and the damage is usually invisible with the mirror assembled.
Likely causes
Start here
- Broken wire in the door harness boot · moderate
- Physical damage from road debris · moderate
- Water ingress into the module connector · moderate
- Corroded or loose connector · easy
Less common
- Damaged wiring harness · moderate
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
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Community experience
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