U0234: Lost Communication With Convenience Recall Module
What to do
The car drives normally. What you will notice is that it has stopped remembering you — the seat and mirrors do not move to your positions, and radio or climate preferences may be forgotten.
Check which key you are using first, because this is very often the whole answer. These systems store settings per key or per driver profile, so a spare key, or a profile that has been switched, will faithfully recall somebody else's settings or none at all. That costs nothing to rule out.
Also worth knowing: if this started after a flat battery or battery change, the stored profiles may simply have been lost. In that case nothing is broken — the positions need setting and saving again.
If neither applies, the useful thing to tell a workshop is that every individual system still works normally when you operate it by hand. That points at the module that remembers rather than at the seats, mirrors and radio individually, and saves them being investigated one at a time.
What this code means
The convenience recall module has stopped being heard from. See U0200 for the block's framing.
"Convenience recall" is the function that restores a driver's personal settings when they unlock or start the car — seat and mirror positions, steering column reach, radio presets, climate preferences, and on some vehicles the pedal position and head-up display height. It is the module that ties a key, a fob or a profile to a set of remembered positions.
Its failure produces a complaint that sounds like several unrelated faults at once, and that is what this page is for. The seat does not move to where it should. The mirrors stay where the last driver left them. The radio has forgotten its stations. Each of those has its own module and its own possible faults, so the natural response is to investigate them separately — and finding nothing wrong with any of them, because nothing is.
A cluster of "it forgets my settings" symptoms, with every individual system working perfectly when operated by hand, is this code rather than several coincidental failures.
One genuinely benign explanation should be eliminated first. These systems recall by key or profile, and a second key, a spare fob, or a profile that has been switched will produce exactly the same experience — the car is faithfully recalling somebody else's settings, or a profile that was never set up. Checking which key is in use costs nothing.
Otherwise, the causes are the block's usual: supply, earth, connector, and the possibility that a stored profile was lost to a power interruption as described under battery disconnection.
Likely causes
Start here
Less common
- Damaged data bus wiring · 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
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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