Has anyone worked out how to solve this yet?
Hi All,
I'll try and keep this brief but unfortunately I tend to waffle on a bit trying to give as many clear details as possible about what I'm trying to say! I apologise in advance!
I have been bothered by this problem myself on the last 3 MK7 Golfs I have owned - a 2015 GTD manual, a 2014 R and my current car a 2016 GTD DSG.
I never tried to apply the Y curve work around to my 2015 GTD but I did apply it to the 2014 Golf R that I had. I have to admit that it worked pretty well and was definitely better than not having any dash illumination at all with the light switch in the "Side Light" position.
When I tried to apply the Y curve mod to my 2016 GTD the Cent Elec module would not let me alter the Y curve values, even though the module accepted the security access code. This pi**ed me off immensely!
I was going to just unplug the lead and settle with the fact that I would either have to wait for a working access code to be found or just never have dial illumination on this car with the light switch in Side Light position.
I don't even know why I did what I did but I decided to look through the available options in the "Instruments" control module Adaptions (module 17 if I remember correctly). I picked through them one at a time (there's nowhere near as many as is in the Cent Elec control module) and somewhere near the bottom of the list I spied a line of text something like "Dimming Curve Algorithm". I double clicked on this to reveal that there were 3 different options available:
"Side Lights" (This was the current setting for my car)
"Not Active"
"lds"
I assumed that I would need to select the "Not Active" option but when I did so I received the error message "Out Of Range". I obviously couldn't leave it there so I tried the "lds" option. It worked a treat! As soon as the controller had accepted the request I switched the light switch to the Side Light position and hey presto the dials lit up with full illumination. I only applied this mod 2 days ago but have tried it numerous times in all sorts of lighting conditions at different times of the day and night - it worked exactly the same regardless of ambient light level.
I can only assume that "lds" perhaps means Light Dependent Sensor or maybe Light Dependent Switch, I honestly don't know. To me, logic would dictate that the option of "Not Active" would be the one I needed so that the dimming curve algorithm wouldn't be included in the dial illumination at all - The German designers clearly had other ideas of what makes sense to them! Ha!
If I've read all the other forums and posts correctly, I'm thinking that this problem is isolated to the NAR and European market vehicles? I think Mr DV52 posted a photo of his dash dials lit while the switch was in the Side Light (Park Light) position? Are Australian VW models not affected at all by this issue?
Hope this is of use to someone. It's about the only one or nearly the only tweak I've found with VCDS that I haven't had to read on a forum.
Happy motoring.
Jon (UK)
