LED bulbs cause the bulb failure lamp to show up on your instrument cluster. This is because the car is monitoring the amount of current used by the bulb to determine whether the bulb is functional or not. The amount of current LEDs take (usually something like 50-200 mA for signal and brake lights) is too small for the car to notice that there actually is a bulb. So it thinks that the bulb is broken and lights up the light in the cluster.

You can get over this by installing an extra load equalizer or similar parallel to LED bulb to fool the car to think that everything is fine. The extra load will pull enough current through.

I am actually playing around with led bulbs right now and it seems that in the rear you could solder extra cables to the black plastic base which holds the bulbs. Then solder the extra load into the new cables. This way you don't need to splice or cut any wires on the car.

Has anyone used load equalizers or extra load with LED bulbs? If, what kind (power, resistance)? I wonder how much deviation from normal bulb LCM can handle before it smokes out...

- p