U0220: Lost Communication With Door Switch F
What to do
The vehicle drives normally. A door beyond the usual four has stopped reporting whether it is open.
The consequence to watch for is a flat battery, especially if the vehicle stands over a weekend. A vehicle that thinks a door is open never fully powers down and drains itself in a few days — see U0215. On a van that stands from Friday to Monday, this is a very ordinary reason for a Monday morning no-start, and it usually gets blamed on the battery.
If the door in question is one that gets held open for long periods, mention it — that is far harder on a switch than anything a car sees.
And if the vehicle is a conversion, the switch may have been fitted by the converter rather than the manufacturer, so their wiring and documentation are the place to start.
What this code means
The sixth door switch has stopped being heard from. See U0215 for the family's framing and U0219 for what a switch beyond the usual four normally turns out to be.
Six door switches places the vehicle among vans, minibuses and larger bodies, and the commercial-vehicle reasoning at U0204 applies here too: the fault is disproportionately likely to be damage or a previous installation rather than an aged component.
One thing is specific to switches rather than modules and is worth naming: on a working vehicle, doors are held open for long periods. A delivery van's side door may stand open for hours a day. That is a duty cycle no passenger car door switch ever sees, and it matters in two ways — the switch contacts spend far more of their life in the actuated state, and the vehicle spends far more of its life being told a door is open, which interacts badly with the sleep behaviour at U0215.
A commercial vehicle with a flat battery every Monday morning and a door switch code is a very ordinary picture, and one worth recognising because the usual conclusion is a tired battery on a vehicle that stands over weekends.
On converted vehicles, the switch may also have been added or relocated by the converter rather than fitted at the factory, so its wiring is an aftermarket installation with all that implies.
Likely causes
Start here
- Corroded or loose connector · easy
- Damaged wiring harness · moderate
- Water ingress into the module connector · moderate
Less common
- Broken wire in the door harness boot · moderate
- Module not coded to the 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
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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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