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Intermittent Adaptive Front Lighting System / Dynamic Cornering Light Error

DeepBlue

Ready to race!
Location
NYC
Car is a 2019 GTI SE with 12k miles. Completely Stock, never been hit, and in perfect condition. Been dealing with this issue for over 3 months at this point. Error pops while driving, sometimes stays a minute or two then goes away, later pops up again. Does not stay on for any extended length of time. There are no burnt out lights and all lighting seems to work properly including cornering lights. System calibrates as normal when car starts. Can happen zero, once or twice or a dozen times each time the car is driven.

Had a local dealer look at it back in December, after almost 2 month part wait, they installed 8V0 907 399 Control Unit & 7P5 941 572 Power Mod. I don't think they even tested anything as error came back in the parking lot as soon as I started the car. Not surprised one bit since they set off all my $&@$ty dealer alarms during my first visit leaving me with zero faith in their ability or care to address this, but was tied to them due to parts they had on order. I left and immediately made an appointment with a hopefully more competent, better dealer.

In meantime, while researching this issue, I cant seem to find much about this error. Hoping this is not one of those electrical gremlins type issue that no one wants to fix or even troubleshoot which will eventually force me to sell this car in disgust and that someone can point me in the right direction.
 

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2018gti

Drag Racing Champion
Location
Massachusetts, USA
Car(s)
Golf GTI Autobahn MT
✋ I had this same problem! It seems kind of rare, besides you I haven’t seen any reports online. I had the whole light replaced when it happened (in 2018) - on the final printout from the dealer it said one of the lights wouldn’t go into service position while they were troubleshooting it. No real helpful codes or anything, just a random AFS error that would pop up then go away quickly like yours. Hope you have better luck with the 2nd dealer. If I had to guess, it was something internal to the light that had gone bad, possibly due to a massive pothole I had hit.
 

DeepBlue

Ready to race!
Location
NYC
Thanks for responding! Amazing... you actually got a dealer willing to troubleshoot and resolve issues... Initially, my service advisor refused to do anything about the error, and instructed me to come back when it stays on full time or somehow make it stay on full time. I'm not kidding. 😡

Instead, I had a nice chat with the service manager about it. Hence, they ordered some parts. Seems like just to get me to go away.

Still got plenty of warranty and I'll be happy to point 2nd dealer in this direction. Also, I'll ask to speak to service manager right away when I drop off the car and relay all the history, ask for his best tech... etc. Hopefully, that will do it.
 
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2018gti

Drag Racing Champion
Location
Massachusetts, USA
Car(s)
Golf GTI Autobahn MT
Oh yeah I should mention that, of course, when I dropped the car off to them it never popped up the warning. So they had me come back to the dealer to pick it up because they didn’t find anything. Then when I went there, I saw the tech pull up with my car and for some reason I got into the drivers’ seat and boom the error showed up as soon as I sat down 😂 I don’t know what the chance of that happening is but I was lucky.
 

DeepBlue

Ready to race!
Location
NYC
Mine is pretty chatty. Pops up during short 5-10 min trips all the time. Sometimes it pops when I'm still in my driveway. I did accumulate a bunch of pics of past occurrences as well. Plus, as far as I'm aware, there should be tons of stored codes in the system for them to look at. Literally dozens of them, if not more.

The trouble with dealers these days is that no one wants or even knows how to troubleshoot anything. They are totally in... lets plug a diag computer in and it will spit out instructions for us mode. If there are no codes, no instructions, hence car is working fine! It amazes me how they trained us to put up with this crap. My other car is a Lexus, and none of this #$@! would ever fly there.

I'm sorry but that just wont work. When a babied 3 yo car with 12k miles and years of warranty left keeps beeping at me like crazy every time I drive it, that makes for poor ownership experience. Surely, VW can understand that.
 
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bobloblawGTI

Autocross Champion
Location
DC
Car(s)
19 GTI SE 6MT
Mine is pretty chatty. Pops up during short 5-10 min trips all the time. Sometimes it pops when I'm still in my driveway. I did accumulate a bunch of pics of past occurrences as well. Plus, as far as I'm aware, there should be tons of stored codes in the system for them to look at. Literally dozens of them, if not more.

The trouble with dealers these days is that no one wants or even knows how to troubleshoot anything. They are totally in... lets plug a diag computer in and it will spit out instructions for us mode. If there are no codes, no instructions, hence car is working fine! It amazes me how they trained us to put up with this crap. My other car is a Lexus, and none of this #$@! would ever fly there.

I'm sorry but that just wont work. When a babied 3 yo car with 12k miles and years of warranty left keeps beeping at me like crazy every time I drive it, that makes for poor ownership experience. Surely, VW can understand that.
Was just talking to a pal of mine about this the other day; I work in IT and it is exactly the same in my field now, too. I'm trying to recruit sys admins for my team and literally all any of them know how to do is run a diagnostic and then shrug if it doesn't come up with anything. The skill of troubleshooting an issue is increasingly lost. And if you think it's bad in computers or cars, just look at what that exact phenomenon is doing to health care, at least here in the U.S.
 

DeepBlue

Ready to race!
Location
NYC
Was just talking to a pal of mine about this the other day; I work in IT and it is exactly the same in my field now, too. I'm trying to recruit sys admins for my team and literally all any of them know how to do is run a diagnostic and then shrug if it doesn't come up with anything. The skill of troubleshooting an issue is increasingly lost. And if you think it's bad in computers or cars, just look at what that exact phenomenon is doing to health care, at least here in the U.S.
You nailed it. Troubleshooting IS a skill. Some have it hardwired and are better at it than others. But I always thought that even those who don't have a knack for it, can learn basic troubleshooting. That is if they want to do it.

Dating myself a bit here... 😉 I remember the amount of work it took to pass MCSE (4.0) or CNE cert exams back before y2k. By having good background knowledge on how things actually work, you can visualize the system and figure out where the breakdown is. Lots of people working in IT now don't have that sort of knowledge. Why bother, when you can Google everything. That's what troubleshooting looks like these days in IT at least. People Googling errors or symptoms.
 

bobloblawGTI

Autocross Champion
Location
DC
Car(s)
19 GTI SE 6MT
You nailed it. Troubleshooting IS a skill. Some have it hardwired and are better at it than others. But I always thought that even those who don't have a knack for it, can learn basic troubleshooting. That is if they want to do it.

Dating myself a bit here... 😉 I remember the amount of work it took to pass MCSE (4.0) or CNE cert exams back before y2k. By having good background knowledge on how things actually work, you can visualize the system and figure out where the breakdown is. Lots of people working in IT now don't have that sort of knowledge. Why bother, when you can Google everything. That's what troubleshooting looks like these days in IT at least. People Googling errors or symptoms.
1000%. I'll never forget my first big boy job out of school, I was asked to perform a computing task that I wasn't sure was possible. I asked my boss if that was the case and he replied: "It's a computer; it will do anything you tell it to do; you just have to know what to say." Much easier to give up than figure out the hard questions, and (to bring it back on topic) your lighting issue is exactly the same. Oh the diagnostic didn't show anything, we can't reproduce it... okay? And? You think I like coming in here and wasting my time with imaginary things? Nail on the head with if they can't google it, they can't figure it out. Sad state of affairs. But on a positive note, hopefully the parts they throw at it work, and the service advisor remains cooperative and open minded.
 

Rollux

Ready to race!
Location
New Zealand
Car(s)
Mk7 1.4TSi
Try replacing both the cornering light bulbs. My wife’s Golf had this intermittent issue for a few weeks that I traced to a damaged filament in one bulb that would make contact and work but would jitter when driving causing the error message to erratically occur.
 

DeepBlue

Ready to race!
Location
NYC
Try replacing both the cornering light bulbs. My wife’s Golf had this intermittent issue for a few weeks that I traced to a damaged filament in one bulb that would make contact and work but would jitter when driving causing the error message to erratically occur.
After reading a bunch of stuff online on how cornering bulbs can set off this error. I tried to pull both cornering bulbs last week. Found that my car has these modules bolted over the bulb compartment covers.

Drivers side is impossible to get to. Looks like you would need to take out the air box. Passengers side is a bit better, but I would definitely need to remove this module. Its bolted in over the cover. Since i'll only be able to get to one, I decided to defer to VW techs.

After all, this is why I upgraded from my mk5 to this one. As is, these cars are a nightmare to work on and I was tired of being elbow deep in mine every other week over some goose chase or other.

If VW dealer cant solve a broken bulb problem. Well... a change of venue might be in order.
 

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DeepBlue

Ready to race!
Location
NYC
1000%. I'll never forget my first big boy job out of school, I was asked to perform a computing task that I wasn't sure was possible. I asked my boss if that was the case and he replied: "It's a computer; it will do anything you tell it to do; you just have to know what to say." Much easier to give up than figure out the hard questions, and (to bring it back on topic) your lighting issue is exactly the same. Oh the diagnostic didn't show anything, we can't reproduce it... okay? And? You think I like coming in here and wasting my time with imaginary things? Nail on the head with if they can't google it, they can't figure it out. Sad state of affairs. But on a positive note, hopefully the parts they throw at it work, and the service advisor remains cooperative and open minded.

I'm 2 parts into the spray and pray sequence of troubleshooting. Going by invoice, they billed VW for about $1k in warranty work/parts. I would be slightly more annoyed than I currently am if I had to pay $1k for no appreciable impact on my issue.
 

2018gti

Drag Racing Champion
Location
Massachusetts, USA
Car(s)
Golf GTI Autobahn MT
Just as a PSA, nothing is serviceable on the facelift LED headlights, besides the 2 control modules. There are no bulbs in the light, just soldered-on LEDs and circuit boards, including the cornering light. (Technically the low beam adjustment motor is able to be replaced but you have to open the access cover with a knife and replace the cover) They aren’t like the xenon’s in the older models.
 

DeepBlue

Ready to race!
Location
NYC
Just as a PSA, nothing is serviceable on the facelift LED headlights, besides the 2 control modules. There are no bulbs in the light, just soldered-on LEDs and circuit boards, including the cornering light. (Technically the low beam adjustment motor is able to be replaced but you have to open the access cover with a knife and replace the cover) They aren’t like the xenon’s in the older models.
Awesome! So now we can't even replace our own bulbs and I thought it was just the new fogs that were sealed whole units. One bulb or part blows and you have to replace entire assembly which probably cost thousands.

Total cost of ownership is just not something they consider when building these cars. In meantime, my wife's old 2010 Lexus RX 350 had a similar dynamic headlight arrangement which was perfectly field serviceable and never had ANY issues in almost 10yrs of ownership.
 
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Rollux

Ready to race!
Location
New Zealand
Car(s)
Mk7 1.4TSi
Sorry, I missed that it was a FL with LEDs, mine is pre with Xenon. I still reckon it’ll be a poor contact or solder joint on a led emitter
 

ZERO815

Autocross Champion
Location
Köln Germany
Car(s)
2017 GTI SE DSG
After reading a bunch of stuff online on how cornering bulbs can set off this error. I tried to pull both cornering bulbs last week. Found that my car has these modules bolted over the bulb compartment covers.

Drivers side is impossible to get to. Looks like you would need to take out the air box. Passengers side is a bit better, but I would definitely need to remove this module. Its bolted in over the cover. Since i'll only be able to get to one, I decided to defer to VW techs.

After all, this is why I upgraded from my mk5 to this one. As is, these cars are a nightmare to work on and I was tired of being elbow deep in mine every other week over some goose chase or other.

If VW dealer cant solve a broken bulb problem. Well... a change of venue might be in order.
Looks like your car is a MK7.5. Sorry they don't have the replaceable cornering bulbs.
 
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