Moonlighter
11-07-2009, 09:56 PM
Hi all
Thought I'd relay my recent troubles with getting my boat trailer, which is fitted with new LED (multivoltage) LED's, to work with my new VE Commodore SV6.
Hayman Reese fitted up the towbar for the dealer. Nice 1600kg rated bar, plus 7 pin flat plug as requested. Looked good.
When I tested the lights on the trailer a couple of weeks ago I found to my horror that they weren't working properly. Having only recently fitted new good quality sealed LED's to the trailer just prior to getting the new car, I knew that they were working correctly - and confirmed this when I hooked up the trailer to my brother-in-law's Camry.
But they wouldn't work properly hooked up to the VE Commodore. To make it even more perplexing, my old box trailer with normal bulb lights worked fine behind the VE! So it seemed to be the LED lights interacting with the VE that was the problem.
The problem was that no matter what was turned on, the whole LED came on - eg if you turned the RHS indicator on, all lights on the RHS came on together - brakes, indicators, parkers, all blinking together. If you put your foot on the brake pedal, ALL lights came on at once. Not good, obviously.
I discovered that like most new cars the VE has a computer (a BCM- body control module) that controls everthing electrical on the car's body including the lights. When a trailer wiring loom is fitted, it has to have a compatible "black box" fitted to decode the signals from the car's wiring loom so that the trailer lights work properly and also, even more importantly, that the car's BCM recognises it as OK, and doesn't shut down the car because it sees a problem.
Hayman Reese have a specific "black box" for just about every car, plus a generic one as well. After checking everything on the VE and not finding anything wrong, they ended up changing the VE specific black box and substituting the generic version and hey presto, suddenly everything works just fine!
So in the end we weren't sure whether this was simply a crook VE black box or something else. But I have seen the issue reported elsewhere so it's apparently not a one-off.
Anyway, a solution was eventually found, thanks to the excellent support and efforts from Arrow Towbars and Caravans who were the Hayman Reese agents who fitted the bar. Top effort guys!!
Cheers
Grant
Thought I'd relay my recent troubles with getting my boat trailer, which is fitted with new LED (multivoltage) LED's, to work with my new VE Commodore SV6.
Hayman Reese fitted up the towbar for the dealer. Nice 1600kg rated bar, plus 7 pin flat plug as requested. Looked good.
When I tested the lights on the trailer a couple of weeks ago I found to my horror that they weren't working properly. Having only recently fitted new good quality sealed LED's to the trailer just prior to getting the new car, I knew that they were working correctly - and confirmed this when I hooked up the trailer to my brother-in-law's Camry.
But they wouldn't work properly hooked up to the VE Commodore. To make it even more perplexing, my old box trailer with normal bulb lights worked fine behind the VE! So it seemed to be the LED lights interacting with the VE that was the problem.
The problem was that no matter what was turned on, the whole LED came on - eg if you turned the RHS indicator on, all lights on the RHS came on together - brakes, indicators, parkers, all blinking together. If you put your foot on the brake pedal, ALL lights came on at once. Not good, obviously.
I discovered that like most new cars the VE has a computer (a BCM- body control module) that controls everthing electrical on the car's body including the lights. When a trailer wiring loom is fitted, it has to have a compatible "black box" fitted to decode the signals from the car's wiring loom so that the trailer lights work properly and also, even more importantly, that the car's BCM recognises it as OK, and doesn't shut down the car because it sees a problem.
Hayman Reese have a specific "black box" for just about every car, plus a generic one as well. After checking everything on the VE and not finding anything wrong, they ended up changing the VE specific black box and substituting the generic version and hey presto, suddenly everything works just fine!
So in the end we weren't sure whether this was simply a crook VE black box or something else. But I have seen the issue reported elsewhere so it's apparently not a one-off.
Anyway, a solution was eventually found, thanks to the excellent support and efforts from Arrow Towbars and Caravans who were the Hayman Reese agents who fitted the bar. Top effort guys!!
Cheers
Grant