Flickering LED Taillights and "Check Taillight" Messgae.

[Dark_stranger]

Guys, I have tried searching for the above problems, but cant find anything that gives me a definitive answer and therefore unfortunately, starting another LED Taillight Question.

I have fitted LED Taillights onto my 04 (Facelift) 3.0i E53 and the lights work fine apart from a slight flicker and I also get the "Check Taillight" dash message. I know you have to fit a capacitor on the new lights, but I don't know what wires I need to add it to. Can someone please help.

The pic attached shows the light wires (top) and the car wires (bottom).

I have also read about changing pins on the light?

[wpoll]

The flickering is because the tail light circuit in the facelift cars uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to vary the lamp brightness.

As long as the LED light you purchased are for the facelift car (and not the pre-facelift) you won't have to change any pins etc. Do all the lights light up as they should?

The capacitors will need to be fitted between each lamp circuit and ground, so you are going to need at least one capacitor per side. There's some good info. on this page...

https://xoutpost.com/bmw-sav-forums/...004-e53-2.html

You are going to need to re-code your LCM to removed the "Check Taillight" message on the dash - that is caused by the low power consumption of the LED (compared to the old incandescent lamp) causing the lamp test system to incorrectly determine that the lamp is blown.

[Dark_stranger]

The lights are intended for pre-facelift cars. The lights all seem to work fine, apart from (I think) a slight flicker. I have capacitors a hand, but just needed to identify the wires to connect them to. Would fitting the capacitor not remove the dash error. Anyway, plan to try and get this done over the weekend.

[wpoll]

You might want to verify that all the lights do actually light up as intended, as there are wiring differences as well as voltage difference in the tail light systems between the pre-facelift cars and the facelift cars.

On the facelift, signals are obvious, tails and brakes less so. Tails are normally four red lights, low brightness. Brakes are two lower red lights, brighter. Adaptive (meaning rapid?) braking is all four red lights brighter again.

The pre-facelift runs all four reds as tails and only ever lights the lower two as brakes.

On the pre-facelifts this is done with multi-filament lamp but on the facelift it's done with single filament lamps modulated via a PWM signal.

A few folk have had to modify the wiring (as you suggested) to get everything working normally. But if your LED tails work, then maybe you don't need to screw with anything. Nice!

The capacitors will only address the PWM flicker and not the cold or hot monitoring that produces the dash warning.