U0516 Low Generic / SAE

U0516: Invalid Data Received From Door Switch A

Network and Communication Invalid Data Received (continued)

What to do

The car drives normally. A door switch tells the car whether a door is open, and the symptoms are the ones that follow from getting that wrong: an interior light that stays on, a warning that a door is open when it is shut, central locking that refuses, or an alarm that will not set.

The reason this is worth fixing rather than living with is the battery. A car that believes a door is open often will not go to sleep properly, and a car that cannot sleep flattens its battery over a few days of standing. If yours has needed jump-starting after a weekend, this code may be why.

The usual causes are cheap. The switch is often built into the door latch, so a latch that has been sticky or noisy points straight at it; and the wires that reach it flex through the rubber boot between door and body every time the door opens.

What this code means

Door switch A is reporting a state that cannot be accepted as true. See U0400 for what an invalid-data code is and why the module it names is usually the messenger rather than the culprit.

The letter is the part of this code that actually tells you something, and it is worth reading carefully.

The standard letters each instance of a repeated module — one per door, one per seat, one per window — so the letter narrows a whole-vehicle fault to one corner of the car before anybody lifts a trim panel. What the letter does not do is say which corner, because the mapping from letter to physical position is the manufacturer's to choose and it is not consistent between makes.

Only the vehicle's own documentation resolves the letter to a location. Guessing costs a stripped door card and proves nothing.

Two practical consequences. If several letters in the same family are stored together, the fault is upstream of all of them — a shared supply, a shared earth, or the bus itself — and chasing one door is wasted work. And if exactly one letter is stored, you have been handed the most valuable diagnostic fact available: the other instances are working, so everything they share is proven good.

A door switch is the simplest device in this range and it causes more expensive problems than most of them, for one reason: the car uses it to decide whether it is allowed to go to sleep.

Interior lighting, the alarm, central locking, the courtesy delay and the 'door ajar' warning all read this one signal. More importantly, the sleep logic reads it too — a car that believes a door is open keeps modules awake, and a car that stays awake overnight flattens its battery over a long weekend. That is the real cost of a fault this small.

On most modern vehicles the switch is not a separate plunger in the pillar but a microswitch inside the door latch, which changes the diagnosis: a latch that has been stiff, noisy or reluctant is the same part as the switch that is now lying. Replacing a latch fixes both.

Almost everything in this range lives in a door, a seat or a tailgate, and that single fact is the most useful thing about it.

A door is the hardest place on a car to keep a wire alive. Every wire feeding a door module crosses from body to door through a rubber concertina — the harness boot — and that join flexes every single time the door opens. Ten thousand cycles later the copper inside a wire can be broken while its insulation looks perfect, which produces a fault that comes and goes with door position and tests fine with the door shut.

Then there is water. A door is a box with a window slot in the top and drain holes at the bottom, and it is meant to be wet inside. When those drains block with leaf litter, the water rises to where the module and its connectors live. Corrosion in a door connector is not exotic; it is the expected end state of a blocked drain nobody cleared.

So the order of work here inverts the usual advice. On this family the wiring genuinely is the first suspect rather than the last — not because invalid-data faults are usually wiring, but because this population of modules lives in the two wettest, most-flexed places on the vehicle.

Open the door and flex the boot while the fault is being watched on a scan tool. A reading that jumps when the concertina is squeezed has told you the answer in ten seconds, and it is the one test most likely to be skipped.

Likely causes

Start here

Broken wire in the door harness boot · moderate
Blocked door drain letting water into the module · easy
Water ingress into the module connector · moderate
Corroded or loose connector · easy

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

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