On 10/1/2023 at 7:05 PM, aaron20100 said:

Hi all,

 

Just wanted to say thank you, I've literally had this error for 3 months and was left scratching my head, I'm shocked at how common this error is and no one comes back with a solution.

 

I followed the wire from the throttle to the battery and found no continuity and just happened to check behind the gearbox and in the exact same spot as yours 2 wire breaks clearly from water or some other liquid getting in and corroding it.

Thanks again.

is this taken from inside the engine bay or from below the car?

Is there any update on this issue?

I’ve just brought a second hand Ford focus 1.6tdci titanium x, I noticed a slight judder on switch off when I went to view and test drive the car but since I’ve not had a Ford before I couldn’t say it wasn’t normal and assumed it was. I purchased the car, on the long run home I noticed the car would vibrate slightly at higher speeds, it was a concern but again because I wasn’t familiar with the car and with the fact it has been fitted with lowering springs and wheel spaces I put it down to that.

I’m now a week into ownership, no other issues that I’m aware of but an engine light has popped up and the juddering at switch of and higher speeds are considerably more noticeable. I’ve used a cheap code reader that I have. Code is P03E4, the same as yours. I’ve read multiple threads online which suggests the throttle body and have now I’ve seen this thread I’m wondering if my car has suffered the same issue and has done before now too.

The reason being is that I can see a dark green wire coming off the wiring loom at the connector to the throttle bottle has been tapped into with a small black wire, I can follow it through the engine bay only so far until it disappears into unreachable areas.

I purchased a new, better equipped code reader with reset/reprogramming capabilities as well as reconditioned throttle body to replace and relearn but this was before I found the wires had been spliced into. 

I’m waiting for replace throttle body and code reader to arrive, I’ve got nothing to loose by replacing the throttle body and relearning it since I’ve already purchased the part but now having found this thread and learning of this issue combined with the fact it looks like someone has fixed or at least tried to fix the problem before I’m worried it’s more serious this time.

I brought the car because my old car failed it’s MOT catastrophically and I need a car for work, without one I cannot do my job. With the purchase of the car, getting it insured/ taxed etc and now the extra bits I’ve bought to try and fix this problem, it’s literally taken every penny I’ve got and I’m worried it’s going to die on me and I won’t be able to work at all. Not to mention the fact I could be doing serious damage by continuing to drive it 

If after replacement/programming of the throttle the issue persists, what would you suggest I do?

I cannot afford for any professionals to look at it and I don’t have much experience myself to do any complicated work.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

8 hours ago, nosteb90 said:

Not to mention the fact I could be doing serious damage by continuing to drive it 

If after replacement/programming of the throttle the issue persists, what would you suggest I do?

I cannot afford for any professionals to look at it and I don’t have much experience myself to do any complicated work.

That is not an easy question to answer, I am afraid. Regarding damage, I do not think this fault will do any direct damage. However it will prevent the engine from doing a DPF regen, which should eventually lead to an error message relating to a blocked DPF, and if a regen is left too long, it can permanently damage the DPF.

The cause found by 2 people in this thread was broken / damaged wires inside the harness. These can be very hard to track down. The fact that your car may have bypass wires spliced in indicates that someone else discovered this, and tried to fix it, but maybe the fix has failed, or another wire has also gone open circuit. Tracking down wiring faults in a modern car is a nightmare. The only help is that on page 1 of this thread, you will find (if you have not already done so), a full schematic, with wire colour codes, for a Mk3 Focus.

 

1.5 TDCI MK3 ford focus 2015

I have a P02E4, throttle valve stuck, it's not stuck, i just don't think it's being moved even though you can see from the photos the valve is being commanded, sometimes it moves as you can see in the photos below. Faulty sensor you might think but when i manually move the valve it reads position changes throughout it's required range 0.5vopen to 4.5v closed. 

The pwm signals look the same to me whether the valve is opening or not, i don't know much about pwm to say whether a certain pattern although supplying what appears to be the correct voltage cannot supply the amps to move the motor 

I can operate the motor from the ecu plug with my own power and ground,ecu disconnected. I have loaded the motor wires with 1.25amp bulb and ecu earth's

Any help would be greatly appreciated

This picture appears to show the power pwm being pulled down 1.2v with the pwm signal that is being pulled to earth.... However note that the tps signal is working at this point. It usually doesn't work as in the motor doesn't operate as I'm sure the sensor signal is showing true life.

Could this be a failing pcm driver (h bridge i think i read somewhere)

On 5/31/2025 at 11:12 AM, eccsensible said:

This picture appears to show the power pwm being pulled down 1.2v with the pwm signal that is being pulled to earth.... However note that the tps signal is working at this point. It usually doesn't work as in the motor doesn't operate as I'm sure the sensor signal is showing true life.

Could this be a failing pcm driver (h bridge i think i read somewhere)

I can't work out what each trace is. The random noisyness in the yellow one looks like a bad connection in the wiring to me, rather than a semi-conductor failure, transistors do not fail like that, in my experience. It is more typical of internal failure in a multi-stranded wire, usually caused by moisture ingress & corrosion.

Hi Peter, thanks for the reply. 

So blue was the throttle signal wire. Yellow was a motor wire which should of stayed at battery voltage and green was the other motor wire being pulsed and on this picture the throttle valve is moving even with all this noise. 

I have some more test results I'll put down below regarding amps.

This was on the ignition off cycle and the ecu appeared to try to control the motor back and forth but only attained approx 1.2 amps both ways (ignore the scale in the picture, clamp set up wrong) and yeah the tv didnt move

On 6/3/2025 at 10:52 AM, Tdci-Peter said:

I can't work out what each trace is. The random noisyness in the yellow one looks like a bad connection in the wiring to me, rather than a semi-conductor failure, transistors do not fail like that, in my experience. It is more typical of internal failure in a multi-stranded wire, usually caused by moisture ingress & corrosion.

Only just learnt how to directly reply. So these pictures are the motor wires and or amp clamp showing pull on the motor wires. Each bulb was approx 1.75amps.

The 2 real messy pictures are ignition cycles with approx 3.4amps applied, the others would be engine running in a state of just keeping the tv open, i just wanted to see the effect of amps. 

I see you said corrosion but i did operate the tv with a direct power and earth from the ecu plug and it worked...... Granted i don't know what effect corrosion has on full on power compared to pwm power?

34 minutes ago, eccsensible said:

Only just learnt how to directly reply. So these pictures are the motor wires and or amp clamp showing pull on the motor wires. Each bulb was approx 1.75amps.

The 2 real messy pictures are ignition cycles with approx 3.4amps applied, the others would be engine running in a state of just keeping the tv open, i just wanted to see the effect of amps. 

I see you said corrosion but i did operate the tv with a direct power and earth from the ecu plug and it worked...... Granted i don't know what effect corrosion has on full on power compared to pwm power?

For the tv to operate, green should be pulsed, yellow should be battery voltage and when it tries to pulse it cannot reach ground with 3.4 amps applied. The other pics are in a state of idle which shouldn't be moving the tv, but with load applied it does drop the voltage

17 hours ago, eccsensible said:

I see you said corrosion but i did operate the tv with a direct power and earth from the ecu plug and it worked..

Looking at the 40us/div trace, I now don't think it is corrosion, more likely an internal current limiter is operating. I assume that trace is of the On time (240us about) of one PWM pulse, and there is a pulsating current limit operating within it, at about 25kHz, compared to the 1kHz PWM. This seems to me quite a normal situation, using a high frequency PWM as a protection system within a separate low frequency PWM. Any trace taken at 1ms per div with the 25kHz limit operating will give false and noisy looking readings (aliasing) as there are too few displayed samples to reveal the full waveform.

I don't know why the current limit is operating, either the TV is drawing excess current, or the limiter in the ECU has got damaged and is cutting in too early. It might require a known good TV to determine what its current draw is, to compare with the TV you have.

A TV that is jamming or run to its limit will draw excess current due to a stalled motor, I would expect.

About all I can say, at the moment.

2 hours ago, Tdci-Peter said:

Looking at the 40us/div trace, I now don't think it is corrosion, more likely an internal current limiter is operating. I assume that trace is of the On time (240us about) of one PWM pulse, and there is a pulsating current limit operating within it, at about 25kHz, compared to the 1kHz PWM. This seems to me quite a normal situation, using a high frequency PWM as a protection system within a separate low frequency PWM. Any trace taken at 1ms per div with the 25kHz limit operating will give false and noisy looking readings (aliasing) as there are too few displayed samples to reveal the full waveform.

I don't know why the current limit is operating, either the TV is drawing excess current, or the limiter in the ECU has got damaged and is cutting in too early. It might require a known good TV to determine what its current draw is, to compare with the TV you have.

A TV that is jamming or run to its limit will draw excess current due to a stalled motor, I would expect.

About all I can say, at the moment.

Thanks again for the reply Peter, i actually have 2 tv as got one off eBay before i even looked at it. The tvs i have draw approx 3-4 amps and are both free. 

I think I'll give an ecu a go as 2nd hand ones are cheap enough. I'll Just need to take my car off the road for a bit to do it. 

Thank you for your input as i didn't understand the make up of an ecu inside

I'll let you know how it goes and I'll post a hopeful known good 

On 6/9/2025 at 1:29 PM, eccsensible said:

Thanks again for the reply Peter, i actually have 2 tv as got one off eBay before i even looked at it. The tvs i have draw approx 3-4 amps and are both free. 

I think I'll give an ecu a go as 2nd hand ones are cheap enough. I'll Just need to take my car off the road for a bit to do it. 

Thank you for your input as i didn't understand the make up of an ecu inside

I'll let you know how it goes and I'll post a hopeful known good 

SOLVED....New Junkyard PCM fitted and programmed

So I fitted a junkyard PCM today and programmed it with Forscan and then took some screenshots, the most telling from the scan tool.

So scan tool image when not working commanded throttle actuator control 100% and PWM signal commanded 38%

when working, commanded throttle actuator control 0% and PWM signal commanded 4.7%

Note, the ignition on screenshot, barely any PWM action, when on the prevous faulty PCM screenshots we can see a lot of PWM on throttle motor wire pin 1.

if anyone wants to know, Programming the PCM

So I bought a dongle from amazon OBDLink Ex FORscan, then downloaded forscan on a windows PC. I had to buy the extended licence as the trial extended licence didn't give me security access to program my PCM.

Not sure if all steps were necessary but;

I initialised/relearned PCM in service procedures i think which copied the VIN from the BCM, it said only do this if you have a P160A code which i didnt, but i did it anyway, this transfered my old vin and details to the junkyard PCM.

I then erased my keys from the RFA module and re-learnt them with the junkyard PCM fitted, this still wouldn't allow me to start it (immobiliser fault) (not sure i had to do this step)

Then in the RFA module, same screen as key re-learn, I did a new PCM re-learn (bottom option in the menu) and hey ho the car starts!