As the complexity and feature in a car or truck increases, it is very difficult for someone especially mechanic or service person to identify the problem. It can be mechanical problems, electrical problems and software problems etc.
To tackle this problem people have come with a nice mechanism to identify the problem that could have occurred in a truck or a car.
Each electrical component will be associated with a unique code and that will be called as either diagnostic trouble code or diagnostic fault code. Along with the diagnostic code, there will a failure type information which informs about type of the failure.
For example consider brake light and there will be a diagnostic trouble code associated with brake light. For brake light not to work, there could be many problems like, it might have happened because of open circuit, short circuit to ground or short circuit to battery or any other electrical problems. To indicate all these problem there is a failure type along with diagnostic trouble code. All the failure type detection mechanism will be implemented in software on an ECU.
If any of a diagnostic trouble code is active then this will displayed on Instrument cluster of the car and driver has to take the vehicle to service station. If service person sees the active diagnostic trouble code then he will immediately come to know about fault component and fault type. So it is very easy for him to fix the problem with a minimal time. Once he fixes the problem, he will check the diagnostic trouble code again. If it is still active even after repair then he would not have done it properly.If the diagnostic trouble code is not active then he has done it properly. So it is like two way one for the owner that service person has done it properly and other way for service person, it is very easy to diagnose the problem and fix it.
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