Steuergerätesoftware beschädigt

A control module's program or calibration has been damaged rather than merely lost — bits altered by a failed write, a supply that collapsed mid-operation, or storage that has degraded.

It is genuinely rare, and its position on any list should be last, because the things that resemble it are all commoner and all cheaper. A module that has simply hung is the first of them: infotainment and body modules are computers, they lock up, and one that has crashed drops off the network exactly as a corrupted one would. A hard reset or a full power-down cycle distinguishes the two in minutes — a module that comes back and stays back was never corrupted. Low supply voltage is the second, since it puts modules into protective states that look identical from a scan tool. An interrupted programming session is the third, and it has its own entry.

When corruption is real, the tell is that it survives. A reset does not clear it, the fault returns immediately or on the next start, and the module may behave inconsistently — working in some functions and not others — because the damage is confined to whatever region was affected.

The important commercial point: corruption is usually recoverable by reprogramming rather than replacement. A module that has been mis-flashed or has lost part of its calibration can very often be rewritten on a stable supply and returned to service. Ask for a reflash to be attempted before a new module is ordered, and expect adaptations and coding to need re-entering afterwards either way — a rewritten module knows nothing about this particular vehicle until it is told.