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Classifying a DTC as active, past or potential

Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair Asked on October 5, 2021

Scantools always classify a DTC as active/current, history/past, potential/memory. How do they classify that?

Sample raw data:

80 F1 5A 05 58 01 C1 00 20 0A

Can you help classify it as past, current or potential?

  • 80 F1 5A : header
  • 05 : 5 bytes of data to consider next;
  • 58 : response for request 0x18,
  • 01 : 1 DTC,
  • C1 00 : it is the DTC
  • 20 : I am not sure
  • 0A : checksum/end of response

I guess that 20 has to do something with the DTC classification as history, present and potential.

3 Answers

Dtc's that are current/active mean the computer is seeing the fault now. History/past means a fault was detected but is not "active right now. Potential/ memory mean that a fault was detected and is not active but has not occured in a 2nd drive cycles . Some faults will turn on the check engine light right away. Others need 2 drive cycles of the fault being present to turn on the check engine light.
Sorry, don't know what those codes mean. Hope this helps.

Answered by cano on October 5, 2021

EDIT: I spent more time reading into this, the individual manufacturer of the vehicle has a lot of control over this. The OBD2 DTC has some standard items but is not required to have a time stamp or indication of age, which is more-so what I think you are looking for in the raw data.
I think the only way you can answer this question is having access to the engineering materials/information from the manufacturer. Maybe with some searching you can find an engineer who has worked on the OBD2 section and can tell you for the manufacturer they worked for. Although since it was standardized (in the US) in 1996, I would bet most of the systems haven't changed much. I do know from my personal experience in "convincing" my car to pass state inspection that a stored code can become a non-stored code. This leads me to believe as I said below that the data is logically separated in the ECU's memory.

Your classification of codes is highly dependent on what scan tool you use.

I am not sure what you mean by "active/current, history/past, potential/memory" but there are two classifications for DTCs when stored in an OBD2 system, potential/pending, and logged/stored. I don't believe this information is stored in the DTC as they are logically separated in the OBD2 compliant car.

The car's ECU classifies DTCs at runtime after checking for a set of conditions. A less severe issue get's classified as pending until the condition occurs X more times. Upon occurring X more times, the code will be reclassified from pending to stored.

A common example of a pending is my Infiniti I30 always has a pending code for the crankshaft sensor. The condition for some reason occurs on startup but never repeats so the DTC never moves to logged/stored and the CEL never comes on.

In short, the classification of pending -> stored seems to be up to the car manufacturer.

A good answer covering some of the things you need to consider about OBD2 is in a fellow stackexchange answer here: Do fault codes get recorded with a time stamp into a log with a history of DTCs?

Answered by finleyarcher on October 5, 2021

after 2008 each ECU has 4 fault recording modes Type 7, Type A, Type 18, and Type 19 pending, current, historical and permanent. The trick is knowing how to program an Adreno of other CAN enabled chip to ask each ECH the magic questions. I do, but I do charge for that...

Answered by TRUscore Certified Automobiles on October 5, 2021

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