as for what's at that link, no joke over 500 codes in the list but here's B009F

 

the c0561-71 code is going to be a bit of a long one. any chance it started happening when you changed shocks? it says you have no abs it seems with that active

seems I've uploaded to many pics haha. when you get to that point I'll pm you a link or something

 

Is it possible that if you lost power through the 12V battery cable that all these crazy codes would pop up? Just trying to read the symptoms of when this occurred and it caught my attention that it was under a heavy load that everything failed. Sometimes the simplest answer can be the issue and we try to overthink a solution...

 

powered by the 12volt circuit it has the 60amp fuse in the AUX fuse box next to the coolant overflow it has a DC to 3 phase 14v AC inverter under the 12v battery..

 

did you ever have any luck getting it fixed?

 

Sorry to go dark on ya all. See photo. I towed it back to Orange County Sunday Jan 29th after it stopped snowing and the roads were clear enough, and dropped it off at the Cadillac, GMC, Buick dealer who told me he had a great tech that knew the Hybrids well. Tehy charged me $440 diagnosis fee. Its been 12 business days, and after a few calls/texts saying they still haven't gotten to the cause. I got a call today saying the technician is pretty sure its the battery, he is now getting P01AF0 and the tech wants me to replace the battery with a new GM battery for $8100 plus installation. I asked him for all the diagnostic code info and he pushed back, I said come on man, I am paying $500 for??? He told me he would print the info for me to pick up.

I am guessing this is some sort of lack of isolation but I haven't had time to look it up. Wow, surprising that this is just so hard! ...open to advice and ideas!

 

that's literally the worse part of these trucks, just no support and being a dealership with access to all the tools you'd think it wouldn't be so bad for them. but I guess being flat rate they just don't want to deal with any of it.

I picked up a clone tech 2, one of the 300$ ones, took about a week to get, there's a section all about the isolation stuff. you can cycle the contacts and stuff. might be a worth while investment if you plan to keep it. sounds like you're going to have to fix it yourself. most get the dealer run around and then just dump the truck as a trade in. it's a shame

the battery you can buy from gm parts direct and install it yourself as one big unit, even with the core charge it's less than 8k. that's kinda wild. but didn't you swap the cells yourself already?


only thing I see close to that code is this. you'll probably have to walk through the diagnostic tree to find it.

 

oh, I. had a thought while diving along. if you're having a isolation issue and it being the contacts, those all inside the battery case. if you go with a battery service like green bean they swap whole metal pack itself. if your isolation issue is in there and you probably are due for a new pack anyways. it might be a good idea to just have them swap packs. cheaper than new and I don't see a lot bad about them.

if your isolatetion is an actual problem like a high voltage wire damaged somewhere, then it still wouldn't start. but just a thought.

 

Alright, time for an update...

This is sooo slow, but I am learning a bunch here and trying to stay positive, thank goodness I am no longer in a hurry and can take things at the pace I have time for...

First the dealer did seem to get a code P01AF0. The technician became convinced that it was my battery rebuild that caused all the problems and refused to work on it further unless they I bought a new GM genuine battery, quoted me $9100. $8500 for the battery and $600 for the install. I had to laugh because at this point I can take the battery in and out with a friend to lift things in literally 15 minutes. Its like 8 bolts and the high voltage disable... doh! NOT worth $600 bucks no matter what that book says! ...thats why they call em' "stealers".

I told them, we definitely were not going to do that. They felt bad and said their would be no charge, and I should tow the vehicle out when I can get to it. ...I actually have to say at this point I guess I was okay with that given the number of weeks and the frustrations trying to convince them they were running tests with out the proper pre-conditions etc etc. So now I guess since I've gotten this far without spend to much money, just time... I had to come up with a new plan.

So I went looking on craigslist just because I was curious....



So now you can laugh at me, I deserve it!!! heh! Brought a another, same year, everything Escalade hybrid with 135K miles and a battery that had been replace at 60K under warranty. It had a check engine light on for 0 oil pressure and the guy just wanted to unload it. ...because of all my previous fun with my truck I knew what that was and that I could fix it for $20 bucks! ...and the battery alone I could probably sell for $1500 as is... Truck drove great and battery clearly was in good shape (especially compared to mine before refurb) So...I now have 2 money pits of frustration! Needless to say I got the "new" one for roughly the cost of the quoted battery. I figured at this point if I saved a $1K troubleshooting the old one by swapping parts and I ended up with a duplicate that is actually as good or better shape as mine for the money I would be ahead.

Now as part of the new plan, I also have identified a dedicated hybrid shop who is willing to take mine in and do the troubleshooting for $149, upgraded my AAA to cover the long tow, and am ready to get this thing to someone who will actually do something. $149 honestly seemed like to low to pass up on, at least if I knew what it was I could put a part in it until I can get a cheap used one now that I have a "twin" truck. ...but I figured I should swap HV batteries between the new and old as a last ditch effort to eliminate that cause.

I went to the dealer, got the keys, they had the truck in the back corner, it didn't look like that had done anything with it (similar to what my gut was saying relative to the tech giving me a bunch of troubleshooting info that made no sense to me relative to how much I had learned as to how it works). In the meantime, I watched a bunch of the Weber university EV engineering/tech classes on Youtube, VERY informative! Unfortunately they use a chevy volt as a instructor vehicle which is a close analog but has substantial differences.

So here is where it gets interesting. Last Sunday I go to the dealer to get the truck ready to tow. The 12V battery was completely dead, I mean COMPLETELY dead. I couldn't believe the dealer let it get into this condition. I know it was good when I dropped it off. None the less I figured oh well cost of playing to win with these guys, I stopped by walmart and bought a new AGM 12V battery and went back and put it in with a friend who was ready to help me swap the HV batteries.

I put the battery in and tried the door locks etc, everything started working. For giggles, I put the key in the ignition and turned it, IT STARTED RIGHT UP!!!

I drove it home about 15 miles, it ran like a champ no problems at all, however the "service hybrid" warning did continually show on the DIC. Then I continued to run it wanting to do 2 things, (1) charge the high voltage battery I rebuilt some, (2) get the code scanner going on it to see what else I could learn while it was running. It didn't seem to be charging at all I assume because of the fault condition. Even when I left in manual shift with the ICE engine running for over an hour it didn't take a charge, I am guessing it disables charging, but it also didn't substantially discharge. The other odd thing I noted that we hadn't noticed when it died in the snow was that even though I had the air conditioner on it was blowing HOT air on the driver side, my friend was like its "cold over here" in the passenger side. ...huh, interesting to note but we didn't know what to think of that.

We parked the truck somewhere it could be left for long time if it "chose" not to restart again. Scanned codes grabbed some reports etc. The P01AF0 code is definitely there as well as DC isolation lost status. Those were the things of note, all hybrid battery control module data looked healthy. I said ok lets turn it off, and then back on. Sure enough go to start it again, "nothing" not even a click! ...back to where were were.

The only two things I could think of is that either the dealer cleared the 'isolation indeterminate" state before killing the 12v battery or somehow disconnecting the 12v battery for a long time got it to clear enough to start. I disconnected the 12v and connected the pos and neg terminals and left it over night, in the morning the same response, "nothing". So at this point I have to believe he reset the "safety" on the isolation and the drained the 12V to where he could go no further. I asked, the service concierge didn't you guys put it on a charger, he said, no I don't think we did. Gee wiz, talk about a half ***'d job if they didn't even try to ensure it wasn't a 12V problem. That being said if he would have gotten it started, clearly the tech would have been convinced it wasn't a HV battery issue... oh well good help is hard to find, especially on trucks that haven't been made for several years, at this point finding decent technicians a cadalliac dealer who know a hybrid appears difficult.

...so for sport I swapped the high voltage batteries and "my" rebuilt battery runs great in the other Hyrbid truck, does indeed act as a new battery should. The dumb thing is getting 23-25 mpg!! I have to say I am impressed! Of course putting in the known good battery made no difference in the "no crank" truck. UGH! I also bought an isolation tester on ebay, will put out 2500-5000v and test isolation between conductors. See picture, acutally this tester works pretty darn good if you ask me. For what would be $2K fluke tester, this was $60 bucks. Anyhow, when I swapped batteries, I tested both batteries and they tested good at the battery level, then I tested the cables going from the battery to under the hood. On the running truck, I got 2 mega-ohms from both the red and black to chassis and to each other. On the non running truck I got between 0.2-0.6 mega-ohms on all three combinations. Clearly different readings indicating some high resistance connection to ground through something.




When I got the keys I had I gotten the dealer to print me the code trouble shooting instructions for the isolation failure (the least he could do for all my troubles). See attached.

From this and the videos I watched it appears any component that can short high voltage to someplace it shouldn't be can cause these loss of isolation safeties to get triggered. If I can find it and fix it it still may not start without scanner that can clear the safety, but it seems like the next steps are to try to find it. From what I can tell its on the DC side of things, the drive motors drove fine and the AC isolation test was "pass" so I presume that the 3 phase generation part of the inverter is working.

So here is where I can use some help, in the troubleshooting procedure I attached it says to run the code reader and find the isolation voltages, so far I cannot find them, if I cold I presume they would show something short of the 'pack' voltage. So I am still missing with things from time to time to find those voltages but admitedly have only spent and hour or two running more codes and generating reports. Second the procedure and the videos suggest to start disconnecting accessories to determine which one might be the culprit. As I understand it if the air condition, heat, accessory modules that run off high voltage have a relay failure or the like they will cause the loss of isolation. This sort of connects with the driver side blowing hot air, I assumed it would be an actutator failure but maybe its a controller failure? So I think I am getting somewhere.

Does anyone have a high voltage wiring diagram or the location of the "air conditioning module" called out in the trouble shooter? So far I am not sure when I open the lid on the inverter what I will be looking for...

Thanks for all the help guys! ...its really helping me get somewhere (I hope!).

-Tom

 

always interesting to see a follow up. I don't see an attached trouble shooting?

I still feel you're deep enough into this it's worth owning a clone tech 2. especially with 2 trucks and fully loaded ones at that. you've probably got over 30 different modules to read. most of the t/s stuff I've seen ask for steps that need to be done with a high level scanner. and for 300$ mine seems to work well. takes a week or so for it to make it to you thou.


crazy that it started up like that thou.


there's a very long post over on the Tahoe forum about them. I used the link from there to buy this one. comes out to 303$ shipped. once you got that and a t/s guide, I'm confident you'll fix this thing and have 2 nice trucks.

https://www.chinacardiags.com/wholesale/tech2-diagnostic-scanner-for-gm-saab-opel-suzuki-isuzu-holden-with-full-package.html