U0266: Lost Communication With Image Processing Sensor B
What to do
The car drives normally. If you have a surround-view or 360-degree camera system, expect it to have stopped altogether.
That total loss usually means one camera, not several. The system will not show you a stitched overhead picture with a section missing, so it shuts the whole thing off rather than showing something misleading. One repair, not four.
You can often identify which camera — if your car lets you select individual camera views, cycle through them and find the blank one. That saves diagnostic time.
If a door mirror has been knocked, folded back hard, or had its glass replaced, mention it. On most systems two of the cameras are in the mirrors, and the wiring to them runs through the door — so a clipped mirror is a very common cause of a surround-view failure.
And if a mirror or bumper has been disturbed, ask whether the system was recalibrated. These cameras are stitched together using known positions, so moving one leaves the picture misaligned even after it starts working again.
What this code means
The second image processing sensor has stopped being heard from. See U0265 for what these sensors are and why losing one removes driver assistance rather than a picture.
A second image processing sensor usually means the vehicle has a multi-camera arrangement rather than a single forward camera, and the commonest of those is the surround-view system: cameras in the front grille, both door mirrors and the tailgate, whose images are combined into a single overhead view of the vehicle.
That architecture produces a symptom worth predicting, because it looks like a bigger failure than it is: losing one camera usually disables the entire surround view. The system cannot present a stitched overhead image with a quarter missing, and showing a partial one would be misleading about what has been checked — so it shuts the whole feature down. A driver seeing the complete loss of a four-camera system may reasonably assume several have failed, when one has.
Which camera is missing is often visible before anything is measured. On vehicles that can display individual camera views, cycling through them identifies the dead one directly — and on those that cannot, the side of the vehicle that was blank in the moments before the system gave up is the clue.
Mirror-mounted cameras bring the U0213 causes with them: everything reaching them crosses the door harness boot, and a mirror knocked, folded back hard or re-glazed disturbs the wiring inside the housing. A surround-view fault after a wing mirror has been clipped in traffic is that, and it is common.
Calibration applies to these as much as to the forward camera — a mirror or bumper disturbed means the geometry the system stitches with has changed, and a system left uncalibrated produces an overhead view that does not line up.
Likely causes
Start here
- Broken wire in the door harness boot · moderate
- Physical damage from road debris · moderate
- Corroded or loose connector · easy
- Water ingress into the module connector · moderate
Less common
- Radar sensor not calibrated after front-end work · specialist
Symptoms
Components involved
Information, not instruction
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Community experience
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