Electrical Gremlins

[Larry's Yellow Rdstr]

2004 coupe with 2000 miles, bought new. The car is always parked in a dimly lit garage. When starting the headlights come up and stay up and on until the car is backed out into sunlight. Until the headlight retract there are no dash lights and the audio system will not play in any mode. No codes apparent. I have not taken it to the dealer. Anyone with similar problems?

Thanx

Lar

 

[Patrick]

Lar,
What you're describing sounds like you have some sort of auto-sensor on ambient light levels to trigger the headlights to come on automatically when driving. (A feature my Z06 does not have, unfortunately.) Which leads me to a question- do you also experience this problem if you're out driving at dusk, and the sensor turns the headlights on? Is it only at start up when this occurs?

The short fix might just be to turn the auto-sensor off when you park it, and back on when your driving it. But that won't solve the reason the radio won't play or the interior dash lights won't work until you've backed the car out of the garage and the sensor turns the lights off. For that, I think we may need C4C5Specialist.

-Patrick

 

[BigJoe]

Sounds like Twilight Sentry is turned on. You can turn it off in the DIC. (Assuming this is NOT a Canadian car. Those cannot be turned off). IMO it is a PITA. Every time I went under a bridge my lights would pop up... I turned it off and kept it off.

 

[cruzer99]

I agree with BigJoe and CORed91, turn off the Twilight Sentry, I did because I don't want to be replacing the headlight motors and/or gears every year. Everytime I started up in a grarge, parking structure, cloudy day, etc. the headlights would pop up and I would listen to the winding of the gears and wonder how long are they going to last. Save the wave.........