Aiways U5: tailgate and locks

If your U5 power tailgate opens only partway and stops, the first thing to know is that the most common cause costs nothing: the car has lost the open height it learned. Push the tailgate fully open by hand, press and hold the outside tailgate switch for about 3 seconds, and release when the buzzer sounds. That reset alone resolves the bulk of "stops halfway" reports. This page sets out which symptom points at which fault, what the car checks before it will move the gate at all, and the codes worth reading before you spend money.

1. Answer first: the reset that fixes most tailgates

The U5 does not use a fixed mechanical stop for its electric tailgate - it stores an open height in the controller. When that stored position is wrong or lost, the gate stops early, quite confidently, exactly as if something had jammed. Owners and workshops then chase a hardware fault that is not there.

The fix is a relearn of the open position, and it needs no tools:

  1. Stop the car, select P. The power tailgate will only run electrically when the car is stationary in P with speed below about 3 km/h. Miss this and the switch will behave as though it is dead - a very common reason people conclude the tailgate has failed.
  2. Push the tailgate fully open by hand to the height you actually want.
  3. Press and hold the outside tailgate switch for about 3 seconds.
  4. Release when the buzzer sounds. The buzzer is the confirmation that the new height has been stored. Silence means the request was not accepted - recheck the P / speed condition and try again.

If that holds, you are done and you have not bought a single part. If the gate keeps "forgetting" its position, the problem is upstream of the button - see sections 4 to 6.

2. What the car requires before the power tailgate will run

Several of the "it is broken" reports are the car declining a request by design. Before it will operate the power tailgate electrically, the U5 checks:

A useful consequence: if the fob and the outside switch both do nothing, the fault is shared - supply, ground or the controller - not the individual button. If only one of them is dead, look at that input instead. The kick sensor is a separate input again, fed separately, and it can either fail or trigger when it should not.

3. The three questions that place the fault

Before dismantling anything, get three answers. They separate almost every U5 tailgate fault into one of three groups.

  1. Is there any sound of a motor? Silence points at supply or control. A running motor points at the mechanism.
  2. Completely dead, or does it move and then stop partway? Moves-then-stops is the position fault in section 4. Completely dead is section 5.
  3. Does the instrument cluster warn you? A "tailgate not closed" or latch warning narrows it to the lock and its signals - section 7.

Be honest about the first one in particular. "It does not open" often turns out, on a second listen, to be "the motor runs but nothing lifts" - a different fault and a different part.

4. Stops partway, or will not hold a set height

This is the most common complaint, and most of the time it is the stored position - run the reset in section 1 first.

If the relearn will not take, or the gate keeps losing its height, the open height lives in the power tailgate controller (PLG). On the U5 that unit sits behind the lower trim panel on the left C-pillar. It is held by two bolts at 6 Nm and has two harness connectors. One point matters more than the rest here: if the controller is replaced, it must be set up and calibrated with Aiways-approved diagnostic equipment - the manual's diagnostic path goes in, selects the power tailgate unit and reads its measured values. A new controller fitted without that calibration will keep stopping in the wrong place, and you will conclude you were sold a faulty part when the car simply has not been taught the new one.

5. Will not open at all

When there is no motor sound and neither the fob nor the switch does anything, check supply and ground before anything else. They are quick to verify, and a dead tailgate with everything else working points at them first.

Fuse and ground designations here are the manufacturer's internal ones. Confirm them against your own car before pulling anything, and leave anything you are not equipped to test to a workshop.

6. Motor runs but the gate does not move: the struts

If you hear the motor and the gate barely moves or moves unevenly, the fault is usually in the power struts - the gas-and-motor units that actually lift the tailgate. Their electrical connectors are BD23 on the left and BD21 on the right.

Two things are worth saying plainly. The struts clip into their support points with a card-style fitting and have no bolt torque setting - there is nothing to "torque up". And they are heavy, so the job needs two people and the tailgate must be supported so it cannot fall. This is not a one-hand roadside task, and a dropped tailgate causes more damage than the original fault.

The codes draw the line between a strut failure and a latch or switch failure - see section 9. Diagnostic faults for the struts split into motor faults (B190101 left, B190201 right) and Hallsensor / position faults (B190301 left, B190401 right), with B190801 and B190901 covering strut drive motor faults. If the motor is what you can hear running, those are the codes to expect.

7. Latch and lock faults

When the gate closes but will not pull tight, sits at the half-latched position, or the cluster says the tailgate is not closed, the fault is in the lock side rather than the lift side.

The diagnostic split matters here. The U5 distinguishes a full-latch signal from a half-latch signal, and reports them separately:

Read together with what the gate physically does, these tell you whether the car is failing to release the latch, failing to confirm it closed, or stopping at the half-latched stage you can sometimes see. The relevant connectors are TK11 for the automatic latch, TK04 for the actuator, and TK07 for the micro switch, which sits behind the licence-plate lamp bracket and is held by two screws.

8. Hardware figures: torque and panel gaps

If work is being done on the gate, these are the manufacturer's figures for the fasteners involved. They are for orientation - a workshop should confirm them for your car before using them.

FastenerFigure
Power tailgate controller fixing bolts6 Nm
Automatic latch assembly bolts23 ± 3 Nm
Manual latch assembly23 ± 3 Nm
Striker bolt23 ± 3 Nm
Hinge nut32 ± 4 Nm
Hinge to tailgate side25 ± 3 Nm
Strut support pointsCard-style clip, no bolt torque

If the gate has been refitted or a panel replaced, the manual also gives the alignment it should close to: tailgate to spoiler 1.5 ± 0.75 mm; tailgate to roof 5.5 ± 0.5 mm; tailgate to rear bumper 4.0 ± 1.0 mm; tailgate to badge 0.8 mm, +0 / -0.5. A gate that will not close flush is an adjustment problem, not a lock failure.

9. Fault codes worth reading

These are the tailgate-related codes from the manufacturer's electrical diagnostic documentation. Two details apply across almost all of them: they are only set within a working voltage range of 9 to 16 V, and the sensor faults also require the anti-pinch condition to have been triggered. That means a tailgate fault logged on a car with a weak 12 V battery can be a symptom of the voltage, not the gate.

CodeWhat it flags
B190101Left strut motor abnormal
B190201Right strut motor abnormal
B190301Left Hall sensor abnormal (position / anti-pinch)
B190401Right Hall sensor abnormal (position / anti-pinch)
B190501Unlock motor fault
B190601Full-latch signal abnormal
B190701Half-latch signal abnormal
B190801 / B190901Strut drive motor abnormal

The manual's own check for the sensor circuit is a resistance test at the power tailgate controller connector: greater than 1 kΩ measured from the relevant terminals (17, 16, 4 and 5 at BD76) to ground. A reading that does not meet that points at a line shorted to ground rather than at the sensor itself. A generic scan tool will not necessarily reach these body codes - see the Aiways U5 fault code index for what can and cannot be read on these cars.

10. Manual document numbers are not orderable part numbers

This catches people out, so it is worth being explicit. The workshop manual identifies components and jobs by its own internal document numbers - for this system, numbers such as 396351 (operation and reset), 360961 (controller), 383581 (struts), 352891 / 396471 / 379231 / 396451 (latch and torque), 383181 and 396371 (adjustment) and 386461 (diagnostic path). Those are not part numbers and you cannot order from them. They identify the manual's own pages.

The references you actually order by are different, and for this area of the car they are:

These orderable references come from our own parts reference, not from the workshop manual, which does not list them. Left and right struts are not interchangeable, and the automatic and manual latch versions are different assemblies - so tell us which one your car has. Because versions change across model years and markets, send the VIN and we will confirm the exact reference that fits your car rather than sending the nearest-looking one.

11. Short answers

What should I try before anything else?
The 3-second relearn: P, stop, push the gate fully open by hand, hold the outside switch for 3 seconds, release on the buzzer. It costs nothing and fixes the most common case.
Why does it work only when the car is in P?
The electric tailgate function is inhibited above walking speed and outside P by design. That is a safety choice, not a fault, and it explains a lot of "dead switch" complaints.
It stopped halfway and the reset did not help. Now what?
The stored position lives in the power tailgate controller. If the relearn will not take, or the gate keeps forgetting, the controller, its calibration or the struts are the next suspects - and a controller that has been replaced must be calibrated with the approved diagnostic equipment or it will keep stopping in the wrong place.
Is this specific to the U5?
The layout - an electric tailgate run by a controller with learned positions and powered struts, plus a separate latch with full- and half-latch signals - is common to the U5 and U6. The difficulty in Europe is not the design; it is that there is no manufacturer network left to read and calibrate the car.
What should I send you?
The VIN, the model year, whether your car has the automatic or manual latch, and a description of exactly what it does - sound or no sound, dead or stops partway. Left and right struts are sold separately and are not interchangeable.

Where this comes from. The behaviour described above is drawn from the Aiways U5 workshop manual - the power tailgate operation and reset, controller, strut, latch, torque, adjustment and electrical documentation, together with the electrical diagnostic manual's tailgate fault codes - combined with patterns reported by owners of these cars in the European owner community. The 3-second open-height relearn is a manual procedure and is also the free fix owners are most often pointed to. The orderable part numbers in section 10 come from our own parts reference and do not appear in the workshop manual, which lists only its internal document numbers. Where the manual does not cover something, we have left it out rather than filled the gap. Wording is our own; we do not reproduce manual pages.

12. Related

Need a part for this? Send the VIN and we will confirm the version that fits — get in touch.