Jamiehol

Active Member
Have used my P38 to tow a caravan and my car trailer for the last couple of years and not had any porblems.

However I have just swapped the caravan and now on the first time the brakes are applied I got a warning that both brake light bulbs have failed.

Now the only difference on this caravan is that it has two high level brake lights fitted by the manufacturer, so my assumption is that the extar draw of these 2x21W bulbs is causing an issue for the BECM and making ti think the brake light bulbs have failed.

Just wondering if anyone has had similar experiances usign their P38 when towing, or has a better knoweledge of how the bulb failure detection circutry works.
 
Brake light failure I would have thought would be too little load rather than too much. The easy way to check is take a bulb or 2 out and see if that affects it. Are you sure they are not LED bulbs?
 
Datetek yes I would agree you would have thought too little load rather than too much, but I guess ti depends on how some mad Brummie designed the circuity.

I did think of removing the bulb, however the lights are individual Hella ones that don't apear to be very easy to get the bulb out, and unfortunatley the caravan manufacturer supplies no instructions on how to get them out.

Deffinatley fillament bulbs as you can see them through the light lense.
 
As there are no fuses in any of the lighting circuits, the BeCM detects both overloads and 'underloads' and will give the warning on the dash. I think yours is due to the high level brake lights on the caravan too.
 
Derek thanks for that given they want to the trouble of detecting overlaods it would have been handy for them to code the appropriate message into the message centre.

Now off to either find some LED bulbs before Thursday or more likely a bypass relay.
 

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