U0219: Lost Communication With Door Switch E
What to do
The car drives normally. The affected item is probably the boot, tailgate or bonnet rather than a passenger door.
If it is the boot or tailgate, two things follow. The car may think it is open and therefore never fully power down — see U0215, because that flattens a battery within days. And the boot release may stop working, since the car will not open something it believes is already open.
If it is the bonnet, the practical consequence is that your alarm's bonnet protection is probably not working. Worth knowing rather than assuming the alarm covers everything.
These switches live at the very front or back of the car where water and salt collect, so corrosion is the usual finding. On a tailgate, the wiring crossing the hinge flexes every time it is opened and is a common failure point.
What this code means
The fifth door switch has stopped being heard from. See U0215 for the family's framing.
A fifth door switch is usually not a passenger door, and identifying it matters for the same reason as at U0203: it is normally a tailgate, a boot lid, a sliding side door or a bonnet.
The tailgate and boot cases are worth separating from ordinary doors because their consequences differ. A boot the car believes is open keeps the vehicle awake exactly as a door does — so the flat-battery mechanism at U0215 applies in full — and it may also prevent the alarm arming. But it adds one thing a side door does not: the boot release itself often stops working, because the vehicle will not power a release it thinks is already open.
A bonnet switch is the other candidate and the one with a security dimension. Its job is to tell the alarm that the bonnet has been opened, and on some vehicles to inhibit certain functions while it is up. A bonnet switch reporting nothing usually means the alarm's bonnet protection is not working, which is worth knowing rather than assuming the alarm is complete.
Physically these switches sit at the very back or the very front of the vehicle, which is where water, salt and impact damage concentrate — and a tailgate switch has the added problem of the tailgate harness crossing the hinge, which flexes like a door boot but is more exposed.
Likely causes
Start here
- Corroded or loose connector · easy
- Water ingress into the module connector · moderate
- Broken wire in the door harness boot · moderate
Less common
- Damaged wiring harness · moderate
- Physical damage from road debris · moderate
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
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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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