An experimental investigation of the occurrence of multiple steady states in the chemical vapor deposition of silicon carbide from methyltrichlorosilane, hydrogen, and hydrogen chloride mixtures is presented in this study. Experiments have been carried out over broad temperature, pressure, and composition ranges in a hot-wall chemical vapor deposition reactor coupled with an electronic microbalance. It has been found that in the absence of hydrogen chloride in the feed, multiple steady states appear at temperatures around 850 degrees C, and that the addition of HCl moves the multiplicity region toward higher temperatures. Multiple steady states have been observed over the whole temperature (800-1400 degrees C) and pressure (20-760 Torr) region covered in our experiments, with the difference in the deposition rate between the upper and lower stable branches exceeding in some eases two orders of magnitude. Since the key parameter involved in the appearance of multiple steady states is the concentration of hydrogen chloride, which depends on the residence time of the reacting mixture in the reactor; the temperature profile, and the reactor geometry, the poor agreement among deposition rate data reported in the literature by different groups may be partly due to the multiple steady-states phenomenon. The appearance of multiplicity is explained qualitatively in terms of a simplified model of SiC deposition.