hi .. not sure if this has been answered. I have a MY VW EOS 2011 (2012 body look) and am tired of the yellow looking light globes at front . I had my local VW mechanic who are very good (not the dealer) replace the day time running light bulbs with after market 'bright white' globes but they stopped working after a few months or would flicker. Can anyone tell me a specific white globe that will work and I will not get dashboard signs . They also replaced the 'side' lights (parking lights) .. and now they have started flickering. Can anyone please send me brand / .ink on bulbs that will work and not give me dash board alert issues and work as normal globes . rkt. Happy to buy from wherever and on line .
VW 2011 EOS Driving Light Globes
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You should be looking at LED's or HID's (headlights and fogs) the key is to purchase ones that specficially state they are CanBus compatible or that they will not flicker or generate bulb out errors on your MFD.
For reference, I have replaced all my interior lights with LED. Door mirror puddle lights and license plate lights also with LED. My headlights are HID with CanBus packs and my fogs are LED with resistor packs. No flicker and no errors on the MFD. What I have not replaced are my front blinkers, bumper parking lights and backup lights. DRL's were also replaced with LED's but since I don't like them and they can't be fully turned off, they have been removed from their sockets and sit inside the headlight buckets. Its a cleaner look.
You can find bulb kits on Amazon or AliExpress. My fogs and HID's came from Amazon, the rest of my LED's from AliExpress
For reference, I have replaced all my interior lights with LED. Door mirror puddle lights and license plate lights also with LED. My headlights are HID with CanBus packs and my fogs are LED with resistor packs. No flicker and no errors on the MFD. What I have not replaced are my front blinkers, bumper parking lights and backup lights. DRL's were also replaced with LED's but since I don't like them and they can't be fully turned off, they have been removed from their sockets and sit inside the headlight buckets. Its a cleaner look.
You can find bulb kits on Amazon or AliExpress. My fogs and HID's came from Amazon, the rest of my LED's from AliExpress
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I don't have the facelift model but on some VAG group cars they saved money with electronic trickery to run dip beams as DRLs but at lower voltage using pwm. Hence they can look horribly yellow. You would need to check if the DRL lamps are running at full voltage or something lower before considering if a led alternative would still work?
North America has the city light bulbs as DRL's, which can easily be switched over to the low beams via VCDS/Odis. I know many states mandated the DRL's to be the low beams, so in some states you see them set that way in other states they are left as configured by VW. Normally set to 50% output, I did not notice any color variance between the default and 100%, but then again that was with the city lights not the low beams.
Your right though, LED's don't like to be run with lower voltage, might be some on the market that are "dimmable" but the ones I used in the DRLs were not, 6000k LED's with resistors, they do look good, better than the halogen bulbs and they match my fogs, but they don't match the HID's. BTW, there is no way to turn the DRL's off via VCDS, but you can set the output value to 1%, which basically turns them off, but they still come on at full power when you turn your parking lights/headlights on.
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MY07 didn't have V.W DRLs option. I fitted Philips aftermarket leds and since they are the only lights on during daylight their 6000K doesn't need to match and a white light is more noticeable by pedestrians. If I read the EU rules on DRLs correctly, they are supposed to be of limited wattage? But the rule setters are in the tungsten dark ages and don't rule for lumens output. Even so, I think the Philips leds meet the standard at 15 Watts per lamp. Many modern cars now have their DRL leds as seperate marker lights around the headlamp in fancy shapes. Since leds are generally a very narrow beam, they can design their aim to hit the eyes of peds. not oncoming But many peds have mobiles glued to their ears or ride electric scooters and don't notice much on coming anyway!
I might be wrong about them dimming the dip beam and it might be the main? Because DRLs are supposed to shine into the eyes of peds. crossing the road, which would be straight and higher than a dipbeam. The only thing about the horrible yellow voltage reduced tungstens is they look so odd they are noticed. I spent some time custom mounting my Philips DRLs to get the aim higher over a 100 yards and they are very visible in rearviews.
I've fitted a few HID's over time (and removed them). I have a pair of 5K off road road projector leds which match fairly well to 6K HIDs. I actually wanted them to be a better match for existing tungsten which I wasn't HIDding. I fitted theater daylight to indoor yellow gel. I Lost a bit of light output but got a much better match to tungsten.
I might be wrong about them dimming the dip beam and it might be the main? Because DRLs are supposed to shine into the eyes of peds. crossing the road, which would be straight and higher than a dipbeam. The only thing about the horrible yellow voltage reduced tungstens is they look so odd they are noticed. I spent some time custom mounting my Philips DRLs to get the aim higher over a 100 yards and they are very visible in rearviews.
I've fitted a few HID's over time (and removed them). I have a pair of 5K off road road projector leds which match fairly well to 6K HIDs. I actually wanted them to be a better match for existing tungsten which I wasn't HIDding. I fitted theater daylight to indoor yellow gel. I Lost a bit of light output but got a much better match to tungsten.
Your nomenclature may be different than ours in the US. You use the phrase dip beam, don't really know what that is, assumed you were referring to the low beam headlights vs. the high beam headlights. The low beam is aimed, low so it does not shine into the windows of cars in front of you. High beams are aimed higher to illuminate further down the road and will shine into the windows of cars in front of you or coming from the opposite way.
Yes, your low is our U.K dip and your high can be our U.K main beam. For DRLs they want the aim to be towards the eyes of peds. crossing in front of your car and shining to the kerb would be an offset albeit lower power light. When your lights are used as DRLs, which beam are they using, the high beam projector or the low beam?
North American EOS's are shipped with the city lights as the DRL's, but some states require the low beam to be the DRL's, so dealers will switch this in ODIS and set the DRL illumination to something like 50%. I don't remember the exact dimmed value for the city lights on my car, as I changed it to 1% which effectively turns them off (can not turn them off in VCDS) but if memory serves, it was either 50% or 30%, it was a noticeable difference in brightness when switching the headlights on and the DRL's transitioned to full power.
FWIW, I did experiment with these settings quite a bit, really trying to figure out how to just permanently turn off the city lights (not just disable DRL's) but never found an option to make the high beams the DRl's. I found two options, "Turn DRL's on" which turns off the city lights and makes the low beams the DRL's and if you turn off the setting, the city lights default back to the DRL's. The only other setting I found was configuring the fog lights as DRL's. I found no settings for making the high beams DRL's. This is all based on halogen headlights being equipped, I did not set the factory headlight to Xenon for testing of these functions, could be different with factory Xenon headlights
It looks like you tried everything. The problem as you found dimming tungsten is they go so yellow moving towards red as the power is reduced. That wouldn't happen with leds and pwm would be ok for them. It might be worth seeing what a led does with the DRL dimmer, you may get bulb fail warning problems, but if V.W are using 12V pwm at a highish frequency they should dim? If their pwm is low frequency which tungsten doesn't mind, leds may flash.
Well I did experiment with the city light DRL dimming settings, 20%, 10% and 5%. At 5% they are barely on, no flickering and they are LED's with resistors, no bulb out errors. I went from 5% to 1%, which like mentioned effectively turned the city light DRL's off. I thought I was GTG at that point, but when I turned my parking lights on, the city light DRL's came on, not as DRL's but as part of the parking light system, which of course is by design, so the dimming function is only applicable to the city lights when used AS DRL's. Somehow I overlooked that fact and spent way more time screwing around with them than I should of. In the end, I just removed them and they sit inside the headlight buckets, taped to a small piece of plastic to elevate the bulb so it does not rest against any plastic surface, although, they don't really generate enough heat to melt anything. Removing the bulbs from the sockets is not an option (generates a bulb out condition if no bulbs are in the sockets)
My amber parking lights and amber turn signals still have the OE halogen bulbs in them, I saw no benefit from converting those to LED.
It can be more pain than gain. I looked at it for my bike. The first problem is the lenses. The wavelength of led orange isn't the same as the turn signal covers for tungsten. Put a led behind and you lose a lot of light. Then there's the on off timing which is designed for the slow build up to on then off for tungsten lamps.
I eventually came up with some magic: I replaced the aged darkened orange lenses with clear aftermarkets and fitted stock 21W orange painted bulbs. Then I bought some of those cheap voltage step up converter boards from Ebay and adjusted the output voltage to 16V. Nothing else was changed and the lamps run about 20% brighter. Since they aren't running for many hours and bulbs are cheap, the reduction in life isn't huge.
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I have replaced many of my bulbs with CanBus leds. I get no dash errors but they flash 3 times when I turn the key to on or start. The only easy way to stop this is to open the drivers door when starting the car. Would this change if the parking or city light became the DRL. BTW, my lights by the rearview mirror, do not do this and they are leds. My guess this is the car's way of checking for bulbs out and works normally with Incandescent bulbs but not leds. Is there anything in the cars programming that can be disabled to stop this bulb check function?
Interesting. I have personally not seen this happen, but then again, I have gone in with VCDS and disabled all of the "cold diagnostics" of the bulbs (that have this option). This is suppose to eliminate the canbus check at power up. Don't remember all of the lights that have this option but I am sure the smaller bulbs like in the side mirrors, map lights etc. don't have a cold diagnostic option in VCDS. Also, this is NOT a fix to a bulb out condition when switching from a halogen to a non-canbus LED, you will still get the bulb out indication regardless of the cold diagnostic setting.
You could try turning off these settings, they are in the Central Electronics module to see if they help.
You did not mention which lights blink three times when you start the car, if its the headlights, you could trying switching your DRL from your low beams to the city lights if you wanted to experiment. While I have switched back/forth between these a few times, I never left them in the DRL low beam configuration for any length of time, so can't say for sure if that is a viable fix.
Blinking occurs with some leds because that's when the cold lamp check is being done at key on. It's happening in the background with tungsten lamps, but you don't see it because tungsten is to slow to show the short test pulse as a flash. If the replacement led was replicating a tungsten lamp it shouldn't flash at all. If it flashes (bright?) then the led lamp cold doesn't look like the near short circuit the cold check expects and the lamp check sees it as an open circuit bulb= FAIL.
I've never understood why everybody uses the semantics 'CANbus compatible'. All lamps whether led or tungsten, have 2 wires. They all get a hot and cold checked the same way. Either a current pulse at key on when cold or the running current is checked when they are hot. CANbus just responds to the result as measured. Therefore the bulb must contain components to suppress or spoof what is monitored by the lamp module so it doesn't send the wrong answer for CAN to then interpret as an error.
True CANbus compatibility might be achieved with an OBDII dongle that intercepts and blocks bulb fail messages, but nobody has made one of those yet. There was a German guy who did some good work on another V.W. He was able to locate module firmware code for lamp testing and modify it. He even wrote an app. with a table of lamps so you could choose which lamps to include or exclude for bulb failure checks.
It's fairly easy to add a few components to a lamp to fool the 'Key on cold' check, but it's more difficult to do it for the hot running current check. Which is why many led lamps are sold with ballast resistors that can get hot, draw the same power, and have to be located in a ventilated space.
If you plug in a replacement led lamp which flashes at key on, the the cold check is still active. It's then down to the lamp internal parts to spoof the cold lamp current or if it's an available option, turn off cold lamp checks with vcds. When I last looked you could turn it off for some but not all lamps. But I would rather keep the fail indications. Small led bulbs are more easily spoofed with a ballast resistor, But this may not work for the cold lamp test because a tungsten lamp appears like a near short circuit for the pulse check. Most of these lamps incorporate a simple capacitor, but there's no guarantee it will work for all car systems using different pulse width durations and number of pulses >1.
I've never understood why everybody uses the semantics 'CANbus compatible'. All lamps whether led or tungsten, have 2 wires. They all get a hot and cold checked the same way. Either a current pulse at key on when cold or the running current is checked when they are hot. CANbus just responds to the result as measured. Therefore the bulb must contain components to suppress or spoof what is monitored by the lamp module so it doesn't send the wrong answer for CAN to then interpret as an error.
True CANbus compatibility might be achieved with an OBDII dongle that intercepts and blocks bulb fail messages, but nobody has made one of those yet. There was a German guy who did some good work on another V.W. He was able to locate module firmware code for lamp testing and modify it. He even wrote an app. with a table of lamps so you could choose which lamps to include or exclude for bulb failure checks.
It's fairly easy to add a few components to a lamp to fool the 'Key on cold' check, but it's more difficult to do it for the hot running current check. Which is why many led lamps are sold with ballast resistors that can get hot, draw the same power, and have to be located in a ventilated space.
If you plug in a replacement led lamp which flashes at key on, the the cold check is still active. It's then down to the lamp internal parts to spoof the cold lamp current or if it's an available option, turn off cold lamp checks with vcds. When I last looked you could turn it off for some but not all lamps. But I would rather keep the fail indications. Small led bulbs are more easily spoofed with a ballast resistor, But this may not work for the cold lamp test because a tungsten lamp appears like a near short circuit for the pulse check. Most of these lamps incorporate a simple capacitor, but there's no guarantee it will work for all car systems using different pulse width durations and number of pulses >1.
For consistency of nomenclature, the term "Canbus Compatible" has risen to indicate that said item has the correct amount of added resistors to simulate the current draw of a standard halogen bulb. Probably done by the Chinese manufactures of said products to indicate to customers that their LED products have been designed as to not trigger the bulb out indicators common in Canbus equipped vehicles. Not a accurate way to describe the product I agree.
The problem is the 'Certain value resistors' are often chosen to emulate the minimum load of a tungsten lamp needed to trip the normal current bulb fail. A resistor emulating the true load may be too large or dissipate too much heat. This trip threshold can vary between cars and the state of the battery. You fit led replacements one day with no lamp out warnings then crank on a cold day with a low battery and the warnings trip for your car if it has a lower trip threshold.
I keep thinking about a universal solution. I've tried a couple of tungsten emulation ideas using hardware which haven't so far been successful. Any solution like that would have to be built into every replacement led bulb, which is why doing something in software seems the best solution?
I keep thinking about a universal solution. I've tried a couple of tungsten emulation ideas using hardware which haven't so far been successful. Any solution like that would have to be built into every replacement led bulb, which is why doing something in software seems the best solution?
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