LIMP MODE from Upgrading Taillight globes

As I use this site as a valuable reference for all things D22 Navara I thought I'd share my latest findings and frustrations

Yesterday afternoon I received some LED Globes to replace the Stop/Tail lights and Blinkers in the Standard Tub Taillights, and also globes to do the number plate lights, when fitting the number plate lights wenoticed that the polarity has been reversed on the driver side unit as it would work with the standard globe but not the led until we cut and reversed the wiring, I thought that would have been strange enough but what happened next left me quite confused.

when we replaced the stop tail lights they worked as they should we were initially only concerned about their brightness coming through the diffuser but decided to leave them in and test them for a few days, this is still in the daylight hours mind you, later that night , I went to drive a short distance and pulling out of my well lit driveway I hadn't engaged the headlights everything seemed normal upon switching on the lights the car felt like it dropped a parachute anchor and lost a majority of its power and acceleration very quickly I switched the lights off and all was returned to normal thinking nothing of it switched them back on again and into limp mode then back off back to normal running :s

Needless to say the globes were removed and the car now runs normally with and without headlights on , I'm just wondering if the ecu or computer sensed that their were no stop/tail lights and as a precaution only allowed minimal power, found this to be very strange but may be a logical reason, main thing is my car is back to normal but this info may help some others having limp mode related issues with their cars who have been into the wiring harnesses of their car

Cheers Everyone
Dave

This should probably be in the d22 section, but anyway hahahah. What year is yours? I have a 2010 and have changed them to led and had no problems. Some people have reported, mainly on d40 models, that just having the brake lights on reduces the power, I'd say it is some sort of safety system to stop people riding the brakes. I think you'll find it isn't the fitting of the led globes, but the globes themselves. Did you check to see if they got brighter with the headlights on when the brake pedal was depressed?

The only reason I ask is because I sort of have the reverse problem, if I have the headlights off and press the brake pedal the parking lights come too. The brake and tail lights work normally though, apart from that issue with them. I'd say being cheaply made there is no or very little circuit separation inside the globes. Obviously they use resistors for the tail light side of the circuit and they really should have a diode on each of the input circuits (stop and tail feeds) to stop voltage feedback, unless they are hoping the LEDs will do this..... I was considering unsoldering the LEDs from the holder and looking at the wiring inside to see what they had done, which I probably will do at some stage, but for now I just drive with lights on so the parkers don't come on when I brake hahahah.

Hopefully that makes a bit of sense, I'd say you are having voltage leaking from the tail light circuit into the brake light circuit and that is causing your problem...

I done my tail lights and no problem. I took them out because the difference in brightness between tail and brake was not enough for my liking.

ozstickman said:

I done my tail lights and no problem. I took them out because the difference in brightness between tail and brake was not enough for my liking.

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Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing. Instead of using resistors to drop the voltage for the tail lights, they really need to only wire up say 1/3 or 1/2 the LEDs in the cluster to the tail circuit and the whole lot to the brake light circuit. I might pull mine back out and open one of them up and see if there's anything I can do to make them brighter and stop the voltage leaking across....