Update

I ordered an lcm III from a place in Colorado. As soon as I plugged it in, it was clear this replacement was bad (random lights, unresponsive, and incommunicado).

Got a refund and after pondering my options, I ordered an lcm iv from England. It took a couple weeks, but arrived today. Now I really thought I would have to code it with my vin at a minimum, but it appears to be plug-n-play. I plugged it it and thus far everything works great. The only thing I have noticed is I no longer have DRLs. That and in the check control text it tells me to check my “rear fog lights”. WTH is that???

Anyway, auto lights work, all running lights as they should, head and brights, backups, brake, hazards, the oil life thingy, the message center is back. Everything. I simply cannot find any reason to mess with a good thing?

I can interrogate it and see the vin of the car the module came out of, but since it works as designed I see no reason to mess with it. I did try to write my vin to it using ncs expert like I have with other modules like EWS, but ncs gave me some cryptic error. I have scanner 1.4 but have never gotten it to work. It seems to want drivers that I have no idea where to get or install, so I threw in the towel on that and the possibility of reconciling mileage.

So, given I was ready to junk the car vs put money into it, and I really could not care less about a tamper dot, with everything back to working like before the other one caught fire, can anyone think of any reason I should continue trying to molest something that’s working well?

Oh, and here is a weird thing I didn’t expect. The vin digits on my car add up to “10” so that’s what I use when unlocking the dash display tests. While the LCM was out of the car, that entire part of the display was completely absent. (Yes, I tooled around with no LCM). Now the replacement LCM has a completely different vin in it, but lo and behold I can unlock that display still using the “10” from the actual vin, even though the LCM is the “check” module and reports a different vin. That’s wild.