Rear window went down, but won’t go up

The rear window went down on the passenger side of my Camry and now it won’t go up. I push the button and there is no sound at all. What do you think is the problem?

What’s the vehicle? 1993 Toyota Camry XLE, 4 door, power windows.

Will it roll up from the back switch? Didn’t try it.

Is the window lock off? Yes.

Do all the other windows work? Yes, the other three go up and down just fine.

Diagnosis by phone:Since I’ve fixed several issues with the same complaint I know that this could be a few different things. First a little background on Toyota’s wiring and electrical logic relating to power windows. For a power window (other than the drivers window) to work both of the switches have to have a low amount of resistence. With no noise occurring there is a possibility that the motor is dead. It also could be that there is a wire in the harness between the door and the body that has flexed enough to break.

Final diagnosis: We pulled the car in and verified that the window was down, but would not go up. We first pulled the rear door panel and checked that the single switch had good continuity in all positions. It did, and so then we pulled the plastic liner up and disconnected the motor. I jumped it to the power wire of the switch and tapped the ground to the other wire and it jumped up a little. Another tap and it moved a little more. I then held them together and it rolled all the way up. I then connected the motor back up to the harness and connected the single switch and re-checked that it would roll down. Down works great. Up still doesn’t work. Off to the master window switch. Checking the continuity on the master switch shows that it is good. Now it’s time to check the wiring harness. This is where some experience kicked in. I have found that many times a wire will break in the harness between the door and the body. After many many times that it is flexed it just breaks. The most likely place for this is the drivers door since it gets the most use. Just for curiosity I plugged the master window switch in and rolled the window down an inch or two since I had previously rolled it all the way up by jumping it. I then pulled up on the switch and wiggled the wire harness between the drivers door and the body. It rolled right up. Usually to find the wire that is bad there will be a lot of testing of different wires. This one was a little easier. A valuable source for fixing these type of problems is a Toyota wiring diagram for the make model and year of your vehicle. For about $10 you can download a complete one for your vehicle from TIS. This is the Technical Information System for Toyota, Scion and Lexus.

Solution: To fix this I needed to pull the drivers door panel for access to the wiring harness. I removed the speaker. I then disconnected the wiring harness from the junction box behind the drivers foot panel. Next I pulled the wiring harness out into the door and then through the speaker opening. Slide the rubber flex tube back to reveal the broken wire. In this case there were 2 others that the sheath had cracked. Figuring that those wires had been flexed also I cut them and spliced all three wires. Put it all back together and the window now rolls up and down faster than it had been prior to the wire breaking.. Probably due to high resistence in the wire that was flexing.