Turbo Actuator Failure.... and more

This isn't necessarily a "help me" post, but depending on how things go, I wanted to lay it out more as a, "if this happens to you" kind of thing to help anyone else that runs into the same problem... whatever this turns out to be.

Details for my truck are in my signature; I bought it CPO at the end of December 2017 and have 29k miles.

On my way home from work Tuesday (5/8), cruising ~60-65 mph on the interstate, the CEL came on and the truck beeped at me 2-3 times. I thought it might be a DEF warning since I'm getting near the end of the tank, but didn't see anything telling me that. I pulled out my OBDLink MX and fired up Torque and found three codes; P003A, U010C and P00AF. A quick look online and it sounds like the VGT actuator is/has failed, but the truck seemed to drive fine and built boost as normal.

Wednesday AM, setup an appointment to take it to the stealership in the first available slot (Sat). On the way home that night I kept an eye on Torque and saw that the Turbo Pressure Control was all over the map. I don't know how it is supposed to behave, but with no throttle applied it is glued to -14.5 (sounds sort of like 1 atm of pressure), but with throttle, it's all over the map; as high as +350 or so. I figured this was probably tied to the actuator failure and possibly a potentiometer or some kind of sensor failure in that unit. In addition to the previous three codes, I picked up a new one; P0046 and the truck is now sluggish to build boost.

Thursday afternoon, headed home and I checked the codes again just to see if anything new has popped up. Five new codes in addition to the other four; P0400, P1878, U010E, U2000 and U20C1. To be honest, those worry me a bit b/c we've left the realm of VGT and are talking about the EGR, transfer case, stereo and three others that I can't locate info on.

I've seen a couple of threads about the VGT issues, but nothing very concise, so I thought I'd use my experience to put one together that might help someone else. Of course given the range of codes that appeared today, this could turn into something else entirely!

 

VGT could bear some relationship to the EGR code, simply because torbo backpressure is part of getting EGr to flow. as far as the other stuff it sounds like computeritis.

turbo actuators fail, but not very often. there is a calibration procedure to install them which means its not something you can do at home without diagnostic tools.

I do know one guy whose turbo actuator took a dump on him a long wa from home and he pulled ot off the turbo, shunted the actuator lever all the way to one side, disconnected the actuator wiring and put the actuator back on and drove it where he needed to get... no exhaust brake or any neat stuff but he did get it home

 

I "think" the last four codes might have been an anomaly, but I can't say for sure.... I'm wondering if I went brain dead while pulling the codes and muscle memory took over and I pressed the start/stop button while it was refreshing... I don't remember, it's one of those times when your brain goes, "wait, what?" lol.

When I checked the codes again last night, only the first four were there. I'll pull them again after I drive home to verify.