New Member Just Bought a Vtrux

[Racerx944]

On 4/28/2024 at 4:37 PM, kmclellan45 said:

Looks like VIA Motors has pretty much ghosted everyone, none of the phone numbers work and no responses to emails. I was looking through some posts of DIY electric car forum and there are a couple of people that rented the datalogging device and after sending it back received no further contact.

 

I believe VIA sold their inventory of the Vtrux parts inventory and is no longer supporting this platform.  a battery recycler  bought 100s of these new A123 5.05KWH modules and resold them to someone else.  I snagged a few of used modules they had and verified they came from VIA as it had stickers from VIA on them.  I also know someone who bought 4 of their inverter/chargers for other vehicles to export power in AC 240V and 120V.

 

On 12/2/2024 at 5:51 AM, louddakota said:

I have a Vtrux I am working on and I did a lot of reading and have a few questions. 

When I try to charge I get a solid red light next to the charger plug. I can hear some (relays or contactors) under the truck clicking but I can't get to a Green light. 

I can turn on the vehicle ing and the cluster will come on but battery voltage is in the bottom of the red and I have a flashing triangle light. 

 

I have the battery out of the vehicle and I have checked each battery module, they all have voltage in them. I fell like the power is not coming out of the pack and into the vehicle. Could this be the contactors I see people talking about? Is there a way to check them since I have the battery module out of the truck? 

 

 

I don't know if you fixed the problem but I am posting for future readers to keep their truck on the road.  "All have voltage" is not specific enough.  The larger (4x) modules are 26S3P in configuration and @ 3.3V nominal voltage, they should be around 85.5V each.  The single 12S3P smaller odule should be at about 39 to 40V.  One of my Vtrux had 2 bad modules causing it to not start or charge.  I pulled the pack out of another running Vtrux I have and it ran and drove so the battery is definitely the problem.  If you have proper voltage in all modules, I would replace the contactors.  You don't have to go with the VIA original as long as you can find the same or higher spec contactors for the EV.

 

On 1/20/2025 at 6:47 PM, ajbessinger said:

Has anyone figured out how to obtain the VDDS diagnostic program for these? Now that Ideanomics (who acquired VIA back in 2023) has gone bankrupt, I suppose there is zero factory support left for these trucks... 

I haven't yet worked on one of these, but I run an EV Repair shop in Portland, and have a customer that contacted me a VTRUX with a charging issue that he seems to think is a contactor issue (which based on what I've seen here may be plausible), but I'd like to be able to confirm that with some sort of diagnostic equipment, and presumably, I may have to potentially clear some DTCs post repair?

The pack is very easy to remove, especially if you have a EV repair shop.  With a car lift and a lift table, I was able to drop the pack in 30 minutes (with the clips for the HV connectors being the most time consuming as I didn't want to break them.  In other words, it is not difficult to drop the pack to inspect components inside as these trucks are a specialty vehicle.  The lid will require 2 people as it needs to be lifted from the back side first, slid forward an inch, and the front side will clear the connectors/coolant hose inlet.  Once the lid is open, it only takes a few minutes to get to the contactors and test/remove/replace them.

Edited April 27, 2025 by Racerx944

[Nicky Ivy]

Via did indeed get CARB EOs for both the van and the truck conversions. (Put Via in the Manufacturer here). But, as the EO says:

Quote

Exemption of the eREV Truck conversion system under these Procedures is limited to sales of 50 eREV Truck conversion systems.

 

Mine was not originally sold in California, which is why I'm guessing that the CARB EO spot on the label was not filled out, so I'm still not sure how it would have gone if they had required I go to the referee.

 

I also made some progress on my issue with the truck overheating. Like some other posters here, on a recent trip to a hotter area than where I normally drive it, the truck suddenly shut off a few times, but then was able to start back up soon after. Afterwards, I ended up diagnosing this as the drivetrain cooling pump was starting to fail, testing just with a 12V power supply connected directly to the pump it would slow down and pull less current over time while the generator one would stay the same speed and the same current. My guess would be the brushes are wearing out but I have not torn down the pump or sent it back for rebuild yet.

 

I was able to order a replacement pump direct from Meziere, ~$640 including shipping. One of the people at Meziere I spoke with on the phone remembered the Via project and told me that for this application the difference between a WP702 and WPX702 did not matter so I got a WP702 pump. I also bought new Magnefine ATF filters (https://magnefinefilters.com/, I  bought from the Ebay listing) so I could replace them at the same time as I was doing the pump.

 

Replacing the pump and filters was quite an ordeal, and I did indeed bathe in ATF as Racerx944 said. I had to take off the front grille to access the filters, and then I also ended up disconnecting the big water pump in the center and moving it out of the way to get better access to the oil hoses. In doing this I discovered the previous filters were installed backwards (coolant flow direction is from the radiator out to the filter), no idea how long those filters were like that or if they were the original filters installed. Take special care to reconnect the filters in original order, at first I swapped them which resulted in me overfilling the system.

 

 

This whole motor cooling system is definitely a major weak point of these trucks. Not only are the motors undersized for this usage, making good cooling extra important, Via never implemented any sort of thermal cutbacks (or at least temperature indications, so the driver could pull back themselves) and just resorted to just having the truck shut off with zero warning when it overheats. And, when this shutoff happens, it shuts off the brake booster. The second (and probably last, at least as heavy as I went) time I towed with my Vtrux my route had a couple hills and it overheated after cresting a hill - stopping and pulling over with a loaded trailer with the brake booster shut off was a bit...exciting, though I managed to pull off in a safe spot and didn't even cause a traffic jam.

 

If the drivetrain motor overheats, it cools down fairly quickly since its only heat source is its own heat generation which stops when the truck stops. But the generator motor cooling has to dissipate both the electric waste heat as well as the carryover heat from being mounted to the engine, so if the generator motor overheats, it takes forever for it to cool back down (>1hour), because you have to wait for the whole thermal mass of it and the gas engine to cool down, and the truck won't run the pumps to cool its motors down when it's overheated. The truck also won't run the generator motor cooling pump when the generator is shut off, so if you were close to overheating and then shut off the engine, the heat soak could carry it over and cause you to overheat.

 

I was thinking about what sort of improvements that could be made to this system. As it's built right now, it's a dry sump system, which helps fulfill the requirement (from the Remy 115D datasheet) to not let oil collect in the rotor/stator airgap. Any changes to this system would have to maintain the same constraints. I've attached my version of the diagram of the cooling system, based off of the diagram from one of the PDFs shared here but in what I hope to be a more readable format. Note that the generator loop's radiator is actually two radiators connected in series, one of which is in the same physical radiator unit (I'm assuming the fluid channels are separate) as the drivetrain loop's radiator.

 

I'm first going to try to pick out the motor temperatures from the CANbus data, so I have a means for collecting data on what I'm doing. If anyone has any information on what CAN IDs I should be looking at, that would be incredible.

 

[rj259609]

Hi all! I have a 2014 Via Vtrux for sale. This truck is a 2014 Via Vtrux. It has 37,872 miles. Very clean and runs and drives as it should. Price is $14,000 if anyone is interested. Im in Madison OH 44057.

[Nicky Ivy]

Some huge news: I've done a bunch of reverse engineering on the Vtrux's CANBusses and now we have a bunch of CANbus specs for helping diagnose these trucks!

 

Quick summary: the Vtrux has 3 CANbuses, I've been calling them them the Powertrain, OBD, and Vehicle buses. Most of the Via high voltage components live on the Powertrain bus: battery, DCDC, generator inverter, charger, power electronics water pump, high voltage AC compressor. The drivetrain inverter and the original GM ECM live on the OBD bus, and the EBCM (brake/traction controls, etc) live on the Vehicle bus. Via's controller spoofs certain messages between the GM ECM and the EBCM to keep both happy (EBCM gets fake always-on engine data, for example).

 

All 3 of the buses are broken out at the white DLC connector below the dash - the Vehicle bus at the standard OBD canbus pins (CAN-H 6/CAN-L 14), then Powertrain at CAN-H pin 1/CAN-L pin 9, and OBD at CAN-H pin 10/CAN-L pin 2. Both of my trucks came with a breakout harness breaking these out to secondary connectors with each bus on the primary 6/14 pins, such that a standard OBDII connector to CAN adapter can interface with the buses that way, and I bet most other Vtruxes out there have these. P2 is the powertrain bus on mine and P1 is the OBD bus.

 

On one of my trucks, this harness was used to break out the OBD and Powertrain buses to wireless Bluetooth dongles, which were then connected to an iPhone tucked under the dash with a logging app. I was able to jailbreak the iPhone and pull the logger app off of it, then with the help of LLM tools using Ghidra, decompile the app and extract the CANbus specs from it.

 

I have not been able to figure out any way to read diagnostic codes from the Via controller - everything I've been able to figure is just directly analyzing log data directly. Which aligns with how Via used to support these trucks, with the mail in logger. But now we actually have meaningful fault diagnostic data - for example, the other day, I was trying to reinstall a pack in one of my trucks after replacing the contactors and cleaning up some corrosion, but the truck wouldn't turn back on when reconnected. I was able to pull a log and diagnose the issue as a high voltage interlock fault, and sure enough, when I got back home and opened the pack back up, turns out I had forgotten to reconnect the interlock connector on the charger HV DC connector which I had done some corrosion cleanup on.

 

Here are some links to the repo where I documented all the findings, including CANBus DBC definition files:

https://github.com/nickyivyca/canbus-reveng-vtrux-coda

https://github.com/nickyivyca/canbus-reveng-vtrux-coda/tree/main/projects/vtrux

 

If you are trying to diagnose issues with the trucks, probably the best option is to take a CAN log while the issue is happening of the Powertrain bus. Then either you can use the tools in the repo yourself to check the log, or you can send the log to me and I can try taking a look. If you do not already have a means of taking a CAN log then these will work if you have access to a Linux based computer that can use socketcan:

USB to CAN/DB9 adapter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09K3LL93Q

DB9 CAN to OBD adapter https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B081N7G2BR 

 

 

Important note: my previous assumption about my coolant pump was wrong. The truck does NOT suddenly turn off when either drivetrain or generator motor overheat. I did separate tests for both motors, unplugging the coolant pump and then driving around until the motors overheated. Both motors gently reduced their torque output when they overheated. It is still unclear to me exactly what was causing my truck to randomly shut off, since I only have one log of when it randomly shut off on me, which does not indicate an interlock or isolation fault, but swapping the battery pack with another running truck completely fixed the issue, so the issue was somewhere in the battery pack. I ended up replacing all 5 contactors, which looked like they had gotten hot over time, so once I can get it back in my other truck I can see if that indeed fixed the issue.