Audi A4 - Dashboard lights

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Wed 23 Feb 2011 17:34
Audi A4 - Dashboard lights - oldruffian

My 1996 A4 TDI is a nice old car that I have had now for more than 11 years - but it has one annoying feature: in daylight, and particularly when you are driving into the sun, the speedometer and rev counter are almost impossible to see against the light. At night the display lights up fine when you turn the outside lights on. I notice that other cars have the display lit up during the day - and it did occur to me that this might have once been the case with my Audi, but that the bulbs may have have failed or a fuse has gone at some time during the car's many years and nearly 200,000 miles. Does anyone know whether or not this model had daytime illumination of instruments? If it did, I can try to fix it - but I don't want to start messing with the dashboard if there was nothing there in the first place.

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Wed 23 Feb 2011 18:10
Audi A4 - Dashboard lights - 659FBE

I have a Skoda Superb which suffered from the same problem - instruments unreadable in strong daylight. I'd like to get my hands on the stupid VAG designer who thought dark red pointers on a black scale would look nice.

As the pointers light up solidly, visibility is much better when lit. Locate the two illumination wires coming from the pod and energise them directly from terminal 15 (ignition live). You need a diode in each lead so that the ignition does not sneak feed into the side/tail light circuit and put them on with the ignition.

The reason there are two illumination wires is that the pod contains logic to detect whether you are using side or parking lights. If parking lights are selected, only one of these wires is live and the pod does not illuminate. My mod preserves this feature.

According to my notes, the wires are Green/Red on 32a/26 and Green/Black on 32a/27. I hope your car is the same, but VAG are usually consistent with wire colours on a given platform.

I'm a bit fed up of correcting VAG design errors on this platform - but as a Skoda it's fair value - if it's a 1.9 diesel.

659.

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Thu 24 Feb 2011 12:27
Audi A4 - Dashboard lights - oldruffian
Thank you for that - I will try it!
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